We know from our research that: 1) many learners find their available time to study limited, and 2) learners can find getting help frustrating as their availability does not match their instructor’s availability. LearningClues helps with time management by using generative AI to provide course-specific virtual teaching assistants that can answer learner questions 24/7 using only the content made available by the course instructor.
LearningClues is a spin-off from the University of Michigan created by Professors Perry Samson, College of Engineering, and Kevyn Collins-Thompson, School of Information. LearningClues was originally funded by the University of Michigan College of Engineering and the National Science Foundation Partnerships in Innovation Program. Since commercialization, LearningClues has received funding from the State of Michigan and the National Science Foundation Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Program.
 | Perry Samson — Co-founder, LearningClues and professor, College of Engineering and School of Information (UMSI) at the University of Michigan (UM). Awarded an “Arthur Thurnau Professorship” for contributions to undergraduate education at UM and recipient of UM “Distinguished University Innovator” award. Previously co-founded The Weather Underground and LectureTools. |
 | Kevyn Collins-Thompson — Co-founder, LearningClues and associate professor, UMSI and Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UM. Member, Michigan Institute for Data Science. Internationally known for contributions to machine learning and large language modeling. For ten years prior to UM, he led large-scale software development projects at Microsoft. |
 | Achintya K Kattemalavad — Lead Software Engineer, LearningClues; formerly Software Development Engineer at Amazon.com. He oversees system design and security, organizes the product roadmap, and plans the execution of project tasks. |
 | Thomas Horak — Mr. Horak, M.S.I from the UM School of Information, is a software engineer specializing in machine learning and natural language processing methods. Mr. Horak oversees the incorporation of large language models into the LearningClues architecture based on his previous experience with generative AI. |
