Michael Chang

Dr. Michael Alan Chang is an assistant professor at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, a faculty fellow in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS), and an assistant director at the Earl Center for Learning & Innovation. Dr. Chang is a learning scientist and computer scientist who envisions AI-supported possibilities for teaching and learning that go outside the dominant, status quo instructional practices of schooling. He builds on ethical, relational, and speculative approaches to participatory design and closely partners with students, their families, and their teachers.

Before coming to BU Wheelock, Dr. Chang was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Berkeley where he worked with two major projects: the NSF Institute for Student-AI Teaming (iSAT) and the Center for Integrated Research on Computing and Learning Sciences (CIRCLS). He led the development of the Learning Futures Workshops, a 3-years co-design effort that worked with youth, teachers, and families. His design work has directly led to the design and implementation of novel AI-based collaborative learning tools that support equitable and democratic outcomes of schooling. This tool, the Community Builder (CoBi), has been deployed in public middle and high schools across the country.

As a doctoral student, Dr. Chang designed and implemented privacy-preserving computing systems, studied system-level support for large scale training of deep neural networks, and developed approaches to automatically deploy and maintain “microservice” computing clusters. He publishes to a variety of different fields, spanning the learning sciences, AI for Education, human-computing interaction (HCI), artificial intelligence, and distributed systems and privacy preserving computing. His work has appeared in many publications, including Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI), International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS), Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd), and Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI).

pronouns: he/him