Bio
Burak Senel is a doctoral student at Iowa State University in Applied Linguistics and Technology. Burak’s academic credentials include a summa cum laude Bachelor’s degree in English Language Teaching from TED University, and a Master’s degree in Natural Language Processing from the University of Arizona, awarded through a Fulbright Scholarship. His innovative approach to integrating AI in education has garnered media recognition, including a feature in Ames Tribune. Notably, he authored a five-module series titled “Exploring ChatGPT in the Classroom” for SAGE and has presented at prestigious conferences such as AAAL, AIRiAL, LARC, MwALT, and TSLL. Recently he has been awarded best graduate student presentation and best graduate student paper awards by AIRiAL and MwALT, respectively. Burak has also been invited to speak at various international venues, such as graduate level courses, symposiums, interest groups, and academic conferences including Lingnan University (HK), Hasanuddin University (ID), Lancaster University (UK), and TED University (TR) on topics related to the use of AI in language education and language assessment. Burak’s research interests include AI-powered language learning, artificial agent use in language education and assessment, automated scoring, and corpus-based discourse analysis. His dissertation centers around developing and validating an interactive and integrated academic listening test with life-like tasks achieved, in part, with generative AI-powered agents, allowing interaction (e.g., question-asking) between test takers and agents in test tasks.