Dr. Zachary Pardos

Founder (Equivalence Systems), Associate Professor of Education (UC Berkeley)

Dr. Zachary Pardos is the founder of Equivalence Systems and CourseWise. As Associate Professor of Education at UC Berkeley and director of the Computational Approaches to Human Learning (CAHL) research lab, Pardos combines his pioneering research in knowledge representation, recommender systems, and Human-AI collaborations with practical applications that serve tens of thousands of students, administrators, and faculty nationwide. CAHL’s groundbreaking research in ML approaches to course articulation – demonstrating how enrollment data and course descriptions can identify academically equivalent courses across institutions – directly informs CourseWise’s mission to re-envision credit mobility and the transfer experience. Pardos’s research has earned recognition through publications in premier venues including NeurIPS, SIGCHI, Science, and Computers & Education, with recent accolades including the 2024 Tools Competition Growth Award and EDM2024 Best Short Paper Award. His trajectory from National Science Foundation Fellowship recipient and MIT postdoctoral researcher to world-renowned expert in educational AI demonstrates his unique ability to translate computational research into practical educational solutions. Through his teaching of keystone courses like Data Mining & Analytics and Digital Learning Environments, combined with affiliate appointments in Berkeley’s cognitive science and data science programs, Pardos bridges computational rigor with educational impact, ensuring CourseWise transforms institutional pathways while maintaining student-centered design principles.

Ioannis Anastasopoulos

PhD Student in Education

Ioannis Anastasopoulos is a second-year doctoral student, studying learning sciences in the Berkeley School of Education. His interests lie in iterating the pedagogy and usability of digital learning environments to enhance student learning. Ioannis has been involved with OATutor since its inception, leading the content creation effort of the project for over four years, as well as working with teachers and instructors to ease integrations of the system into their classrooms.

Shreya Bhandari

Undergraduate Student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Shreya Bhandari is the lead research developer for the OATutor project. She has been working with the team since 2022, running experiments and continuously expanding OATutor’s capabilities by incorporating the latest advancements in LLMs. Her research interests include leveraging AI for practical educational impact, computer tutoring, reinforcement learning, and personalized learning.

Yunting Liu

PhD Student in Education

Yunting Liu is a second-year doctoral student in the Social Research Methodology (SRM) cluster at the UC Berkeley School of Education. Her research interests are centered around latent variables models, mixture models and psychrometric applications.