Ayorkor Mills-Tettey is a Ph.D. candidate in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.  She grew up in Nigeria and Ghana, and then moved to the U.S. for university in 1997.  She majored in Computer Science at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and then stayed at Dartmouth for a master's degree at the Thayer School of Engineering.  In 2003, she returned to Ghana to spend a year teaching computer science at Ashesi University in Accra before joining the Robotics Institute in 2004.

Ayorkor's current research focuses on robotic path planning.  She is also very interested in understanding the synergies between technology and education, especially in developing communities.

The LISTEN Reading Tutor can be thought of as an agent acting under uncertainty.  Its estimate of the current "state," that is the current reading ability of the child, depends on noisy probes or observations such as answers to automated questions presented to the child and measurements of latency and production time as the child tries to read a word.  Further, its interventions or actions such as word building exercises, vocabulary help, etc., have uncertain results.  In the face of this uncertainty, the reading tutor needs to make decisions about which interventions to use at each point in time in order to maximize the child's progress in learning to read.

This project aims at addressing the second aspect, namely, evaluating the effects of tutorial interventions on a lexical level.  The goal is to determine the long term expected reward of executing a given tutorial intervention in a given tutor state, using reinforcement learning.