About Adelson

I am a PhD student at the University of Twente’s Department of Instructional Technology, where I am supervised by Ton de Jong, Susan McKenney, and Pantelis Papadopoulos.

In my PhD, my primary motivation is to provide evidence on the role that conversational agents can play in fostering productive dialogues during online science lessons. For that, I am implementing a conversational agent that handles group conversation in a pedagogically meaningful way with the help of AI.

My bachelor’s degree was in computer engineering, and my master’s degree was in systems and computing, both from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil). While I was there, the SmartMetropolis group gave me my first taste of research publication. I was fortunate enough to win two Google LARA (Latin America Research Awards) research prizes in 2018 and 2019 to put toward my predictive policing project. In addition, I worked as a data engineer in the Public Ministry of Rio Grande do Norte, where I led interns, managed a data lake infrastructure, and built dashboards to help prosecutors analyze public budget-related issues.

My current research interests include conversational agents, computer-supported collaborative learning, language models, and AI ethics.