A Pitt research team won a 2026 Tools Competition prize

A cross-disciplinary team of University of Pittsburgh researchers has won a prize in the 2026 Tools Competition for a project that uses college writing to improve AI-supported instruction.

The team includes Xiang Lorraine Li, an assistant professor in the School of Computing and Information’s Department of Computer Science; Diane Litman, a professor in the Department of Computer Science, senior scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center, and associate dean for mentoring and development in the School of Computing and Information; and Gayle Rogers, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor and chair of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of English.

The Tools Competition, organized by The Learning Agency and a program of Renaissance Philanthropy, is a national contest that funds new education technology. Pitt’s project was one of 21 winners selected from more than 1,400 submissions this year. The prize carries $100,000 to support the work.

The team’s winning project is a multimodal college-level writing and feedback dataset that gathers student essays, instructor feedback and classroom materials from first-year writing and creative writing courses in the Department of English. Compared with the writing datasets researchers typically use, the Pitt essays are longer, and the feedback digs into idea development, narrative and clarity rather than surface-level corrections.

The dataset is designed to support research on how students develop as writers, and to give AI researchers higher-quality material for building and testing automated writing-feedback systems. The project has collected 566 essays so far, with a goal of gathering 15,000 to 20,000.

Photography by Aimee Obidzinski