This $140,215 National Science Foundation project grant will fund the development of a privacy-preserving intelligent tutoring system and associated natural language processing models to improve health education for low-literacy Hispanic breast cancer survivors. Awarded on September 1, 2022 with a completion date of August 31, 2025, the grant supports two objectives.
First, the awardee will customize an intelligent tutoring system using existing educational content to effectively interact with and query Hispanic breast cancer survivors, taking into account nuances in their language and technology interactions not addressed in prior work. Second, they will develop privacy-preserving algorithms using robust end-to-end encryption to encrypt and decrypt distributed data in real-time without hindering tutor-user conversations. Outcomes aim to understand the role of culture and education in low-literacy Hispanic survivors' interactions with tutoring systems, develop a framework facilitating systems for minority populations, and create accurate, low-latency privacy mechanisms for related natural language processing and dialogue interfaces. The Research Foundation for the State University of New York will receive the award under the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering program.