Awards and Honors
October 2009
The diploma thesis of Frank Loll on collaborative filtering algorithms applied to eLearning was elected to win a sponsorship award by the association of friends of Clausthal University of Technology.
October 2008
Within its "Project-based Personnel Exchange Programme" for 2009, the DAAD (German Acedemic Exchange Service) awards a grant of approx. 8 K€ to the research group of Prof. Pinkwart. Within the project
"Engaging students in learning argumentation through intelligent collaboration technologies", Prof. Pinkwart and his colleagues at CMU (Vincent Aleven) and at
the University of Pittsburgh (Kevin Ashley, Collin Lynch) will modify the existing LARGO program so that it engages students more actively.
September 2008
The DFG supports the research group of Prof. Pinkwart with approximately 164 K€. The grant is awarded for the research project
"Learning to Argue: Generalized Support Across domains (LASAD)"
which was proposed jointly by Bruce McLaren (DFKI) and Niels Pinkwart. The total DFG funding for LASAD is approximately 344 K€. The aim of the project is to create a generalized framework and methodology for the construction of argumentation support
systems to help students learn argumentation in different domains.
April 2007
The DFG awards a travel grant to Niels Pinkwart in order to support his attendance of the
13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (
AIED 2007) and his presentation of the paper
"Evaluating Legal Argument
Instruction with Graphical Representations Using LARGO" (co-authored with Vincent Aleven, Kevin Ashley and Collin Lynch). The paper shows the results of a first empirical evaluation of the Intelligent Tutoring
system LARGO.
September 2006
Niels Pinkwart and his colleagues Vincent Aleven, Kevin Ashley, and Collin Lynch win the Best Paper Award at the 4th eLearning Conference
of the German Computer Science Society (
DELFI 2006) for their paper
"Schwachstellenermittlung und Rückmeldungsprinzipen in
einem intelligenten Tutorensystem für juristische Argumentation". The paper presents the ITS system LARGO and focuses on the AI strategies within the system that
determine which feedback message (out of many possible) to offer the users.
June 2006
The paper
"Toward Legal Argument Instruction with Graph Grammars and Collaborative Filtering Techniques", written by Niels Pinkwart and his colleagues
Vincent Aleven, Kevin Ashley and Collin Lynch, is nominated for the Best Paper Award at the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems
(
ITS 2006). The paper introduces the technology underlying the novel intelligent tutoring system LARGO (Legal ARGument Graph
Observer), which is designed to help law students acquire argumentation and hypothetical reasoning skills.
February 2006
The DFG awards a travel grant to Niels Pinkwart. This allows him to present his dissertation work at a
colloquium at Schloss Dagstuhl.
The PhD thesis "Collaborative Modeling in Graph Based Environments" of Niels Pinkwart is nominated for the Dissertation Award of the GI and elected the best Computer Science
dissertation 2005 at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
December 2004
iPal, a web portal co-designed by Niels Pinkwart and Andreas Harrer, wins the 1st Prize for the best online lecture support system
in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen. The price is awarded for the support of the "Software" lecture.
July 2003
The Martial Vivet Best Paper Prize for Young Researchers at the 11th International Conference on
Artificial Intelligence in Education (
AIED 2003) is awarded to Niels Pinkwart for his paper
"A Plug-In Architecture for Graph Based Collaborative Modeling Systems". The paper presents the
concepts and architecture of "Cool Modes", a collaborative modeling framework.
1995-1999
Niels Pinkwart receives a scholarship by the
German National Science Foundation.