AI in education should scaffold human reasoning, not substitute for it. That is the argument of my research, stated in a position paper at the ACM AI Leadership Summit 2026, and the principle behind everything I build.
I am a doctoral researcher in the pan-European ELLIS PhD Program at ELLIS Alicante, supervised by Dr. Nuria Oliver (ELLIS Alicante), Prof. Tanja Käser (EPFL, ML4ED lab), and Prof. Juan Antonio Pérez-Ortiz (Universidad de Alicante). In my thesis, Socratic Dialogues for Learning: Toward AI-Enabled Human Active Learning, I develop Socratic educational chatbots that respond to students with critical questions rather than answers, fostering reflection, argumentative reasoning, and metacognition while limiting cognitive offloading. I test them where it counts: in real classrooms, with real students.
I was trained at the intersection of mathematics, computational neuroscience, and natural language processing, with an M.Sc. in Mathematics and an M.Sc. in Interdisciplinary Neuroscience from the University of Geneva, both with highest distinction. My long-term goal is to design AI systems that develop human capacities rather than automate them away.
Highlights
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Visiting researcher at EPFL, 2026
Six-month research stay at the ML4ED lab (Prof. Tanja Käser), March–September 2026, funded by a competitive ELIAS mobility grant (ELLIS Research Exchange).
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MAIKE: an open-source Socratic chatbot
Analyzes student essays through argument mining and engages learners with adaptive critical questions. Full system presented at the Tools for Thought workshop, ACM CHI 2026.
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A classroom study: run, not planned
Ethics-approved, between-subjects study with 65 secondary-school students (June–July 2026): pre- and post-intervention argumentative essays, and full dialogue logs. The evidence →
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1st of 13 international teams at ACL 2025
Lead author of the winning system in the Critical Questions Generation Shared Task, 12th Workshop on Argument Mining, ACL 2025 (Vienna). Paper · Press release
Recent news
- 7 Oct 2026 Talk at the IV Alicante Futura Summit, Parque Científico de Alicante: “AI and education: what do we want students to learn? MAIKE, a Socratic chatbot to support critical thinking”. Event
- 31 Aug 2026 Poster at the ACM AI Leadership Summit 2026, Atlanta: “From Substitution to Scaffolding: Breaking the Self-Reinforcing Harm Cycle of AI in Education (and Beyond)”. The paper is on arXiv and will appear in the summit proceedings. arXiv
- Jun–Jul 2026 Evaluated MAIKE in a classroom study with 65 secondary-school students, comparing it with a conventional chatbot during argumentative-essay revision.
- 25 Jun 2026 Invited talk at the IDIAP social computing group, Martigny: “Teaching AI to Ask: MAIKE, a Socratic Chatbot”.
- 5 May 2026 Presented the MAIKE classroom-study design at the ML4ED group seminar, EPFL, Lausanne.