Talks & Teaching

Keynotes, conference presentations, and course development

James Sharpnack Sketch

Artistic touch

20+
Invited Talks
7
Courses Taught
2024-2025
AAAI Co-organizer
3
Area Chair Roles

🎤 Keynote Speaking & Major Talks

🏆 NeurIPS 2024 Workshop Keynote

"Building a High Stakes Online Test with Human-in-the-loop AI"

The First Workshop on Large Foundation Models for Educational Assessment • Vancouver, Canada

Comprehensive overview of constructing the Duolingo English Test using human-in-the-loop AI. Covered item construction with generative AI, automated scoring, item calibration, and security measures including eye-gaze tracking and LLM response detection.

→ Video on NeurIPS Page

Conference Leadership & Organization

Senior Area Chair & Co-organizer: AAAI Workshop on AI for Education (2024 & 2025)
Area Chair: International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025, 2020)
Area Chair: Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)
Conference Organizer: UC Davis Statistics 40th Anniversary Conference (2020)

Recent Major Presentations

2025: National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), Denver, CO
2024: 9th Conference of the International Association for Computerized Adaptive Testing (IACAT), Seoul, South Korea
2022: Data Science Conference, Texas A&M • OpenSearch Conference, Fremont, CA
2022: KDD Tutorial: Multimodal AutoML for Image, Text and Tabular Data, Washington D.C.
2021: Statistics Department Seminar, Columbia University, NY

📚 Teaching & Course Development

STA 208: Statistical Machine Learning

Graduate-level course • Taught: Spring 2016-2021

Machine learning is how to get computers to automatically learn and improve with experience. This course covers learning algorithms that use data to improve with respect to performance metrics under computational constraints.

STA 220/141B: Data Science with Python

Upper-level/Masters course • Taught: Winter 2017-2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2021

Comprehensive data science pipeline covering data extraction, processing, visualization, and web technologies. Focus on Python and Javascript tools for end-to-end data science workflows.

Course Topics:

• Git and collaboration
• Jupyter, Python basics
• NumPy, Pandas
• SQL databases
• Data visualization
• Web scraping & APIs
• HTML, CSS, JavaScript
• D3.js visualizations

Additional Courses Taught

STA 251: Advanced Machine Learning (Winter 2019)
Survey of modern deep learning techniques and applications
STA 220: Data Technologies (Winter 2020)
Advanced data processing and computational methods
STA 131A: Introduction to Probability Theory (Spring 2016)
Foundational probability for undergraduate students
STA 290: Department Seminar Series (Fall 2016)
Graduate research seminar coordination
MATH 11: Introductory Probability and Statistics (Spring 2015)
UC San Diego • Undergraduate probability fundamentals

🎯 Educational Impact & Leadership

AI for Education Innovation

Leading the intersection of AI and education through research, keynotes, and workshop organization. Co-organizing major workshops on responsible AI in education and developing cutting-edge assessment technologies.

PhD Student Mentorship Success

10 PhD students graduated with placements at top companies: Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook AI, Amazon. Students have continued to leadership roles and published extensively in top-tier venues.

→ View Student Success Stories

Conference Reviewing Excellence

NeurIPS 2019 highest scoring 400 reviewers award • Regular reviewer for top venues including NeurIPS, ICML, AISTATS, COLT, and premier statistics journals.

Industry-Academic Bridge

Translating cutting-edge research into practical applications at scale. From academic foundations to deployment of AI systems serving millions of users in education and search.