Events & Programming

LIVE Learning Seminar Series

Weekly sessions bring the community together to explore emerging technologies, research, and ideas shaping the future of learning. Through talks, tool demos, panel discussions, and interactive dialogues, the seminars create space for shared inquiry, practical insight, and new connections.

Seminars are held on Wednesdays 12p-1p in the LIVE Seminar Room [1400 18th Ave S] A 2009

Date Title Presenter

September 2 Virtual Reality Cave Marcus Watson

September 9 Ignite Tech Grants - Cohort 2 Sarah Burriss, Namrata Srivastava; Eric Park

September 16 Coming Soon

September 23 When can AI strengthen human, relational skills? Insights from testing AI-enabled training for novice therapists Ryan Louie

September 30 No Seminar Event Attend the LIVE Core Event on Oct 1

October 7 Against the Singularity Hypothesis: Why AI May Not Become Superintelligent David Thorstad

October 14 Beyond Emotion Recognition: Expressions as Social Action Jonathan Gratch

October 21 No Seminar Event Fall Break

October 28 From Guardrails to Transformation: Cross-Industry Lessons on the Human Side of AI Adoption Ines Voellinger

November 4 Toward Process-Based Measures of Workload, Effort, and Scaffolding in Education Conrad Borchers

November 11 School of Nursing & CHAIN (Collaboratively Harnessing AI for Nursing) Angel Anthamatten

November 18 AI, Amplify & Metro-Nashville Public Schools Eleanor Hancock & Jennifer Russell

November 25 No Seminar Event Thanksgiving Break

December 2 Student Horizon Grant Awardees Clayton Cohn, Joyce Fonteles, Fanjie Li, Wesley Morris

Past LIVE Learning Innovation Series

Spring 2026

Date	Title	Presenter(s)
Jan 21	The Promise and Peril of People Analytics	Salvatore Falleta
Jan 28	Examining Learning in the Age of AI	Special session with 3 visiting scholars: Chin-Chung Tsai, National Taiwan Normal University Chen-Chung Liu, National Central University Jiun-Yu (Jerry) Wu, Southern Methodist University
Feb 4	Amplify and MAJK: Homegrown AI Tools for Supporting Teaching and Learning	Allen Karns
Feb 11	Mental Models at the Intersection of Learning and Human-Robot Interaction	Joseph Michaelis, University of Illinois - Chicago
Feb 18	AI In Legal Practice and Learning	Mark J. Williams, Founding Co-Director of VAILL
Feb 25	From Research to Real-World Impact: SANDI’s Journey	Nilanjan Sarkar & Jan Schlueter
March 11	Spring Break	NONE
March 18	The CCC: Radical Collaboration for Innovation Across Disciplines	Dean Mathew Johnson-Roberson
March 25	AI, Big Data, and Privacy: Lessons from the 19th Century	Sarah Igo
April 1	Building REED: Navigating the End-to-End Challenges of Developing an AI-Powered Dialogic Reading App	Abbie Petulante, DSI Postdoctoral Fellow
April 8	LIVE Ignite Grant Advances in Ed Tech Development	Ignite Grant Recipients
April 15	How domain-general associative learning can explain (what appear to be) sophisticated cognitive capacities in human infants	Deon Benton

Fall 2025

Date	Title	Presenter(s)
Sep 3	I (Want to) Know What You Researched Last Summer	LIVE Community
Sep 10	Growing Minds, Growing Machines	David Tovar
Sep 17	Human-Centered Bioelectronics and AI: Learning from Continuous Health Data to Transform Care	Yayun Da
Sep 24	Faculty Research Funding Brainstorm	Closed Session
Oct 1	Human-Centering LLMs at their Foundation	H. Andrew Schwartz
Oct 8	Fall Break	No Session
Oct 15	LLM Persona-Agents for Social Science Research	Lisa Fazio
Oct 22	LIVE Ignite Grant Advances in EdTech Development	Ignite Grant Recipients
Oct 29	Why is Learning Difficult in the Workplace?	Rangaraj Ramanujam
Nov 5	How LIVE Horizon Grants are Powering Student Innovation	Student Horizon Grant Recipients
Nov 19	Multimodal Analytics and the Classroom of the Future	Gautam Biswas
Nov 26	Thanksgiving Break	No Session
Dec 3	Machine Learning Models of Mathematical Thinking and its Development	Sashank Varma, Georgia Institute of Technology

Spring 2025

Date	Title	Presenter(s)
Jan 15	AI for Next Generation Science Education	Xiaoming Zhai
Jan 22	LIVE Spark Grant Advances in Literacy, Music, and Care	Spark Grant Recipients
Jan 29	Spark! LIVE Gaze: An Interactive Display Combining the Art and Science of Eye Tracking	Albert Na and Dan Levin
Feb 5	How Do We Read and Understand Code?	Zachary Karas
Feb 12	Advancing Psychometrics with Network Science and Artificial Intelligence	Alexander Christensen
Feb 19	Postponed Until March 19 - Malicious Machines: The Intersection of Phishing and LLMs	Carlos Olea and Maxwell Lieb
Feb 26	Spark! ChatEDU: Designing AI Tools Students Actually Use	Vasco Singh
March 5	AI Days	No Session, join us for AI Days 2025
March 12	Spring Break	No Session
March 19	Malicious Machines: The Intersection of Phishing and LLMs	Carlos Olea and Maxwell Lieb
March 26	Empowering Innovation with Human-Like AI Models That Leverage Developer Behaviors	Yu Huang
April 2	The Roberts Academy and Dyslexia Center: Current Services, Future Visions, and Potential Roles for Learning Technologies	Joseph Wehby
April 9	Spark! LIVE & Wond’ry Ideator Program Pitch Showcase	Ideator Program Participants
April 16	Student-AI Collaborations for the 21st Century Classroom	Sidney D'Mello, University of Colorado Boulder

Fall 2024

Date	Title	Presenter(s)
Aug 28	Innovation in Action: LIVE's Impact and Future Vision	Alyssa Wise
Sept 4	Designing Tools for Children to Question and Reimagine Computing	Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens
Sept 11	Fairness Reconsidered: A Reparative Lens on Algorithmic Justice	Jenny Davis
Sept 18	Spark! LIVE Learning Innovation Demos	LIVE Community
Sept 25	AI Adoption in the Workplace and the Future of Work	Xi Kang
Oct 2	Spark! Research Brainstorm Session	LIVE Community
Oct 9	Fall Break	No Session
Oct 16	Multimodal Composing with AI	Melanie Hundley, Blaine Smith
Oct 23	Spark! Exploring Current and Future Research Partnerships with MNPS	Erin Henrick
Oct 30	Learning Socially With and About Playful Creative Computing	Vishesh Kumar
Nov 6	Spark! Session Coming Soon	LIVE Community
Nov 13	Investigating the Impact of Metacognitive Supports in a Mathematics Digital Learning Platform	Kelley Durkin, Cristina Zepeda
Nov 20	Math Misconceptions Data Science Competition	Scott Crossley, Bethany Rittle-Johnson, Kelley Durkin, Rebecca Adler
Nov 27	Thanksgiving Break	No Session
Dec 4	Spark! Bridging the Gap Between Physical and Virtual Reality with Multisensory Experiments	Mark Wallace, David Tovar, Marcus Watson

Spring 2024

Date	Title	Presenter(s)
January 24	Unlocking Digital Potential: The Impact of Algo Digital Coding Game on Young Minds	Serkan Ozel (Bogazici University)
January 31	Spark! Accelerating Learning Tech Innovation at Vanderbilt	Community Session
February 7	Rights-Based Approaches to AI Ethics in Education: Co-Designing an AI Bill of Rights For and With Students and Educator	Sarah Burriss (Teaching and Learning)
February 14	Spark! Tobii Pro 3 Eye Tracking Glasses Demo and Uses	Eduardo Davalos (Computer Science)
February 21	Understanding Students’ Collaborative Problem Solving during STEM+C Learning Using Multimodal Analysis	Caitlin Snyder (Computer Science)
February 28	Please look out for information on 4 public talks LIVE is hosting this week	No Session
March 6	Spark! LIVE Grant Collaboration Session	Community Session
March 13		Spring Break
March 20	Spark! What can LIVE’s research Engineer do for you?	Albert Na (LIVE)
March 27	Spark! Social Entrepreneurship for Learners	Mario Avila (Director, Turner Family Center for Social Ventures)
April 3	Spark! How to Utilize Human-Centered Design in Your Research	Zainab Agha (Computer Science)
April 10	Reading Today: Multimodal Processing of Reading Behaviors for Digital and Paper Reading	Goodwin Lab (Teaching & Learning)
April 17	Decision-Making in Simulated Driving Experiences	Abigale Plunk (Electrical and Computer Engineering)

Fall 2023

Date	Title	Presenter(s)
Aug 30	Admin Meeting
Sept 6	First LIVE lunch - Introducing the Director & LIVE	Alyssa Wise
Setp 13	National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Automated Scoring Challenge for NAEP Mathematics items: The grand prize solution.	Scott Crossley
Sept 20	The Vanderbilt Smart Meadow: an Intelligent Ecosystems Approach to Soiling your Undies (and combating climate change)	Chris Vanags
Sept 27	Code to Joy: A music themed framework for teaching CS	Will Hedgecock
Oct 4	Vanderbilt Interaction Analysis Lab	Rogers Hall & Caleb Vatral
Oct 11	Audiences of the future: using physiological and behavioural measures to investigate immersion in film and television	Hugo Hammond
Oct 18	NONE	Interdisciplinary Faculty Meeting
Oct 25	Towards Explainable & Trustworthy AI for Healthcare and Smart Cities	Meiyi Ma
Nov 1	Learning Engineering: A Process and Practice to Support Learners and their Development	Jim Goodell
Nov 8	The Belmont Forum: Utilizing Transdisciplinary Research to Systemically Address Sustainability Challenges	Meagan Postemma
Nov 15	NONE	Interdisciplinary Faculty Meeting
Nov 22	NONE	Thanksgiving Break
Nov 29	Preparing for the Future of Work and Energy: Chevron’s Approach to Developing Digital Skills	Patrick Voorhies
Dec 6	Teens (Re)storying the Creek with STEM (T-ReCS): Place-based Education and Digital Storytelling with AR	Hannah Ziegler

Spring 2023

Date	Title	Presenter(s)
Jan 11	Pearson’s Learning Design Principles: Scaling the Science of Learning at a Global Ed Tech Company	Katherine McEldoon
Jan 18	Identifying Gaze Behavior Evolution via Temporal Fully-Weighted Scanpath Graphs	Eduardo Davalos
Jan 25	Perception and Action in Immersive Virtual Spaces: How Well Are We Building Virtual Worlds?	Bobby Bodenheimer
Feb 1	NONE	Cancelled due to weather
Feb 8	An interdisciplinary analysis of nurse training in mixed-reality simulation environments	Madison Lee
Feb 15	A Simulator for Individualized and Adaptive Driving in Virtual Reality and its Applications in Autism Intervention	Nilanjan Sarkar
Feb 22	C2STEM: A Collaborative Computational STEM learning Environment that promotes synergistic learning of science and computational thinking (CT)	Gautam Biswas
March 1	A Deep Learning Approach to Classifying Students’ Domain-Specific Utterances During Collaborative Problem-Solving	Clayton Cohn
March 8	A Human-Centered Approach to Improving Adolescent Real-Time Online Risk Detection Algorithms Accessibility Quest VR Demo	Ashwaq Alsoubai Naima Samreen Ali & Sarvech Qadir
March 15	Spring Break	NONE
March 22	Design of a collaborative virtual environment for dyadic interaction to facilitate teamwork and collaboration	Nilanjan Sarkar
March 29	Minds in Motion: New Ways of Embodied, Technology Mediated Learning and a Demonstration of the Generalized Embodied Modeling Learning Environment	Noel Enyedy
April 5	Digital Textbooks – Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Develop Responsive Readers	Langdon Holmes & Wesley Morris
April 12	From Lab to Market: Commercializing Vanderbilt’s Intellectual Property	Peter Rousos
April 19	Examination of brain stimulation to facilitate foreign language learning	Laurie Cutting & Amanda Martinez-Lincoln
April 26	Development and Testing of a Mobile Web-Based Coaching Tool to Improve Pre-K Classroom Practices to Enhance Learning	Caroline Christopher

Fall 2022

Date	Title	Presenter(s)
Aug 31	Introduction to LIVE and the talk series	Dan Levin
Sept 7	Interactive Demo #1. “Technology to teach programming: Using NetsBlox to teach students amazing technical skills and to be masters of on-line data.”	Akos Ledeczi
Sept 28	SPICE – Science Projects Integrating Computing and Engineering, an NSF-funded STEM+C Design and Development project that develops NGSS aligned curricular materials integrating computational modeling with science and engineering for students in grades 5 and 6	Gautam Biswas
Oct 5	Vanderbilt Interaction Analysis LabAssessing the Influence of the Internet: Does Digital Text Exposure Affect Language Processing?	Michelle Perdomo
Oct 12	Fall Break	NONE
Oct 19	How does accounting for classroom space help us think differently about teaching and teacher learning?	Ilana Horn
Oct 26	Education in the Metaverse? An overview of VR, AR, and spatial technologies	Ole Molvig
Nov 2	Interaction Analysis for Learning Science. Interaction analysis is a method used to explore the organization of learning and teaching in video and audio recordings of human activity.	Rogers Hall
Nov 9	Objectively Measure Students’ Cognitive Activities in Programming: Code, Biases, and Brains	Yu Huang
Nov 16	AI, Ethics, and Science Fiction: Fostering Ethical Discussions Around Fiction and Film Featuring Advanced Technology.	Sarah Burriss
Nov 30	Identifying students’ study strategies and ways to support effective strategies via supervised machine learning for text analysis	Cristina Zepeda
Dec 7	NONE	NONE