This May, we were excited to welcome Kirsty Kitto as our new Professor of Artificial Intelligence in Education at SLATE!  

Professor Kirsty Kitto's research focuses on understanding cognition and learning in complex socio-technical systems. She has just moved from University of Technology Sydney (UTS), where she was a member of the Connected Intelligence Centre (UTS:CIC). UTS:CIC is a strategic innovation centre specialising in using human-centred design, learning analytics (LA), and AI to support the student experience.

Professor Kitto brings with her over 10 years of active research in learning analytics and even more in the field of AI! Kirsty has a wide-ranging background. Her first degree was in theoretical physics, but along the way, she extended her studies to pick up majors in mathematics and philosophy…then computer science and Spanish! If you want to hear about some early exposure to poor pedagogy that profoundly influenced her later professional development, you can ask her to tell you that story one day…

In her PhD, Kirsty Kitto attempted to understand a concept she termed high-end complexity, exhibited by contextual systems that are difficult to understand reductively.  

Kirsty’s background has led to a long history of collaboration in interdisciplinary teams, across a wide range of topics and domains. During her postdoctoral years at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Kirsty partnered with computer scientists, experimental psychologists, complex systems scientists, and cognitive scientists to develop models of cognition and language, a program of work that was funded by the Australian Research Council, and even the 7th European Framework.

Kirsty’s teaching was also highly regarded: After working in a team awarded for its innovative approach to first-year science programs, Kirsty was seconded to a team of innovators identified across the university. They worked to consider how QUT might respond to the disruption created in the sector by MOOCs. This led to her starting to work in the field of learning analytics in 2014, and even to her leading the first funded project to try and use the new xAPI data standard for learning analytics.

This project brought her into collaboration with many of the founding figures of LA, and from there led to her move to UTS. There, she has worked on data literacy microcredentials, taught in a Master's of Data Science, and continued her work in learning analytics, with a core focus on data interoperability for lifelong learning, and supporting data and AI literacy for educational stakeholders.