AIT graduate wins International Federation of Inventor Association top prize for pioneering ‘COMET’ system

An alumna of AIT's Computer Science and Information Management Program, School of Engineering and Technology, Dr. Siriwan Suebnukarn, recently won the prestigious International Federation of Inventor Association’s (IFIA) Lady Prize for the Best Women Invention, at the 2007 International Invention Show and Technomart, Taiwan, on 27-30 September 2007.

The award was for her work on COMET: an intelligent tutoring system for medical problem-based learning. Her pioneering work successfully passed the Asian, Africa and Australia semifinal round of the World Cup of Computer Implemented Inventions (CIIs), and has been chosen to compete in the final round of the World Cup of CIIs in 2008.

Dr. Siriwan developed the system during her doctoral studies at AIT, under the supervision of Professsor Peter Haddawy, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and professor at the School of Engineering and Technology (SET). Dr. Haddawy’s research interests include decision-theoretic problem solving; probabilistic reasoning; modeling and elicitation of user preferences; personalization; electronic commerce and medical applications.

The COMET system is designed to provide an experience that emulates (as much as possible) that of live human-tutored medical problem-based learning sessions, while at the same time permitting students to participate collaboratively from disparate locations. COMET uses generic tutoring algorithms applied to models of student understanding, generating tutorial hints to guide problem-solving activity. A comparison of learning outcomes shows that student clinical reasoning gains from COMET are significantly higher than those obtained from human-tutored sessions. Results of the research have been published in several top journals.

Now that Dr. Siriwan has returned to her faculty position at Thammasat University’s School of Dentistry, her work is continuing in the form of collaboration between AIT and Thammasat University.

Dr. Dr. Andras Vedres (right), President of the International Federation of Inventor Association (IFIA) presents Inventor’s award to AIT alumna Dr. Siriwan Suebnukarn (left).