Lisa A. Ballesteros

Lisa Ballesteros is the Jean Sammet Associate Professor of Computer Science. She received the BS degree in Biology and Mathematics from Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. in 1987 and the PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2001. Prof. Ballesteros’s research is primarily in the area of text-based Information Retrieval (IR), where she did seminal work in Cross-language Information Retrieval (CLIR). Her main interest in text-based search is to develop techniques for low resourced languages.

Her current research is in computing education. More specifically, she is working with others to develop identity inclusive training materials for teaching assistants with the goal of broadening participation and retention of students from groups underrepresented in Computer Science. This work aims to evaluate the impact of training on the TAs as well as the students who work with them. She is on the steering committee of the NSF INCLUDES Alliance for Interdisciplinary Innovation in Computing Education (AiiCE), co-leads the AiiCE training constellation, and was a Cultural Competence in Computing (3C) Fellow.

Prof. Ballesteros has been very active in bringing issues related to the impacts of technology on society, especially the connections between Artificial Intelligence and Social Justice, into the courses she teaches. She is passionate about finding ways to increase students’ feelings of belonging using approaches that include shifts in pedagogical practices. As IGD Fellow, she plans to build an Intergroup Dialog (IGD) based pedagogical approach as a framework for curricula that explore the impacts on society of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in particular and technology more broadly. Her long-term goal is to embed this pedagogical approach into the Computer Science curriculum.