Burr Settles leads the research group at Duolingo, a language-learning website and mobile app whose mission is to make language education free and accessible to everyone.

Burr’s PhD thesis is titled "Curious Machines: Active Learning with Structured Instances", which he completed in 2008 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We talk about his work in the thesis on active learning, then chart the path to Burr’s role at DuoLingo. We discuss machine learning for education and language learning, including content, assessment, and the exciting possibilities opened by recent advancements.

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[39] Burr Settles - Curious Machines: Active Learning with Structured Instances

Each episode of The Thesis Review is a conversation centered around a researcher's PhD thesis, giving insight into their history, revisiting older ideas, and providing a valuable perspective on how their research has evolved (or stayed the same) since.