Presenting my paper at AAAI/EAAI 2026 in Singapore

From January 24 to 26, 2026, I was in Singapore for AAAI-26, where I gave an oral presentation of our paper at the 16th AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI): How does LLM-powered coding assistance shape incidental learning? Exploring cognitive forcing strategies in programming education. Ours was the only student group from the University of Dayton at the conference.

LeetCoach

Under the supervision of Dr. Ngoc Nguyen, I worked with Patrick Thomas and Quang Nguyen to build LeetCoach, a full-stack coding practice platform. It runs offline, open-source LLMs that give learners guidance on problems instead of handing them the answer. We designed and built it before LeetCode released Leet.

On the system side, the backend is a set of microservices that communicate through a message queue, so requests are processed asynchronously. This keeps latency low when many users practice at the same time.

On the learning side, we asked how guided interactions based on cognitive forcing strategies affect incidental learning. We ran a controlled user study that measured learning outcomes and interaction patterns in the AI-assisted coding environment.

Giving the oral presentation.

And beyond the conference

The conference also gave me the chance to explore Singapore. Before coming here, I thought this country was boring. But my first time on this island quickly proved me wrong.

It's been so fun that I could walk for hours just wandering through every corner.

This trip became ever more meaning when I got a surprise invitation to visit the Google Singapore office.

I also stopped by Shopee’s headquarters, the company I spent three years as a software engineer before graduate school.

Presenting a paper, exploring a new country, and visiting Google and my old company Shopee, all in just a few days. I’ll remember this trip for a long time.