Upcoming talk · AI/ML Seminar Series
Understanding and Improving the use of LLMs for Education
Senior Lecturer, Computer Science, University of Sydney
- Date & time
- Monday, October 5, 2026 · 11:00 AM
- Location
- Donald Bren Hall 4011
Abstract
AI has the potential to extend the capabilities of educators and improve learning outcomes. In this talk, I will describe new metrics for understanding how students use LLMs, new methods that expand the reach of an active pedagogy technique, and techniques that still drive models off-topic. Along the way, we'll see implications for the idea of AI-resilient user interfaces, identify limitations in the ways most LLM-based education systems are evaluated, and learn about how students are balancing AI-based tools with traditional resources. To conclude, I'll present a lightning round of key findings from other work in my group, spanning hallucinations in code, benchmarks for visualisation generation, human-AI teaming methods for clinical coding, and more.
About the speaker
Jonathan K. Kummerfeld is a Senior Lecturer (i.e., research tenure-track Assistant Professor) in the School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney. His research focus is Natural Language Processing, particularly when applied in the domains of programming and education with the aim of augmenting people rather than replacing them. His work has appeared at a variety of leading venues, and has won awards, including a Social Impact Award and Senior Area Chair Award at ACL. He has been funded as an ARC DECRA fellow and a Monash scholar. He has been on the program committee for over 50 conferences and workshops, served as the CTO for ACL Rolling Review, and is a standing reviewer at TACL and CL, leading journals in NLP.