UC doctoral student awarded prestigious doctoral fellowship

UC doctoral student awarded prestigious doctoral fellowship

Amota Ataneka received one of 35 National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowships

When Amota Ataneka first learned of the National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, he didn't know it was one of the most prestigious awards for emerging scholars in education research. He just knew he needed to apply.

"I heard about it from my supervisor, but I think these are the kind of things that you don't really know the significance of until you've been in the field for maybe 10 or more years," says Ataneka, a doctoral candidate in the University of Cincinnati School of Education's Educational Studies PhD program (Quantitative and Mixed Methods Research Methodologies concentration). It was only after he was announced as one of only 35 award recipients nationwide that his supervisor, professor Ben Kelcey, explained the importance of the recognition. "When it was confirmed, he told me that everyone in education knows this one is a little bit too competitive!" Ataneka laughs.

To say this level of academic success is a long way from Ataneka's origins would be an understatement. He was born in the island nation of Kiribati, in Muribenua village on Nikunau island, a coral atoll with a population of close to 2,000 that sits south of the nation's capital island, Tarawa. Kiribati is recognized as one of the least developed countries in the world by the United Nations, and life on Nikanau is defined by subsistence activities, primarily fishing and collecting coconuts. And while the capital island features some modern amenities, Ataneka wasn't exposed to many technological advancements as a kid-though what he could access made an indelible impact.

"We have a TV," says Ataneka, referring to one single television set used collectively by all the islanders. "That's our access, our window to see the outside world. You go there, and you pay coconuts to enter." It was on this TV that he caught his first glimpse of a life he'd eventually pursue. "I'm pretty sure it was one of the Harry Potter movies. That's where I heard [the term] 'professor.'" Ataneka couldn't totally suss out what a "professor" was, thinking the label was perhaps a certification, but he understood the term was descriptive of someone who possessed wisdom.

"I wanted to be a professor."

A global pursuit of knowledge

This drive to attain wisdom was apparent from an early age and has guided Ataneka throughout his life. He studied hard with a dream of being able to one day be accepted to the best high school in Kiribati, which was in Tawara and where he'd be exposed to a more modern way of living. When he achieved that goal, Ataneka figured he'd go on to university in Fiji, the only pathway to higher education he was aware of-Kiribati has no universities. Then, during his senior year, a teacher told him of a scholarship provided by the Australian government to one student annually to attend college Down Under.

"Typically the top student in the country would go to Australia," he explains. "The next five people go to New Zealand, and then the rest go to Fiji, funded by the local Kiribati government." Ataneka noticed that the top six scholarships tended to go to natives of the capital, not students from the outer islands who had to navigate cultural differences alongside their rigorous studies, and made it his goal to beat the odds and win the Australian scholarship. "So that's when I kind of started studying extra hard," he says, adding with a laugh, "I didn't enjoy high school much because I was just thinking."

Scholarship winners were announced on the radio, and his whole village gathered at the community hall to listen as Ataneka was named the winner of the Australian scholarship. "It was a big moment for my village," he says. "They all know that's a very tough one for our island kids."

Upon graduation Ataneka headed to the University of Queensland, where he received a bachelor's degree in economics, then came back to Kiribati. But after a few years working in a government job, he started thinking once again about becoming a professor. He began researching scholarships to attend graduate school in the U.S., eventually finding the U.S. South Pacific Scholarship, which provided four people funds for graduate studies at the University of Hawaii. It cost him nearly a week's pay to mail in his application, but within a few months he received word he'd been awarded one of the scholarships.

While he was at the University of Hawaii studying public administration, Ataneka learned about how people fund doctoral studies in the U.S., which only one other person from Kiribati had ever done. He knew he wanted to apply his learnings in quantitative economics to the field of education, and he started looking for programs that fit his educational aspirations. He found two programs with faculty doing work he was interested in, emailed both, and when UC was the first to respond, he made the choice on the spot.

Prestigious recognition for cutting-edge research

Today Ataneka serves as a graduate assistant with Kelcey as he works on his Spencer Fellowship-winning dissertation, "Causal Machine Learning with Reflective Latent Variables: A Latent Deep & Targeted Learning (LDTL) Architecture."

"We built a new AI architecture to address two fundamental limitations of AI for scientific research," he explains. "First, the core architecture of current AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, which is built on a deep neural network architecture called Transformers) is designed for prediction, not causal inference. A formal or scientific way of studying cause-and-effect relationships of a particular program, treatment or policy requires specific assumptions that must be satisfied before causal claims can be made."

The second limitation, says Ataneka, is that current AI architectures such as Transformers do not know the difference between two kinds of data: latent constructs-academic achievement, burnout, self-efficacy, anxiety and trust-and directly observed variables such as height and weight. "Most, if not all, data that we deal with in education and the broader social sciences come from surveys or some form of assessment (like academic tests) because many important concepts cannot be measured directly; they are latent," he explains. "Because these constructs are quantified using multiple items or survey questions, they are always measured with some degree of error. Current AI algorithms do not account for this measurement error, and it is well established in quantitative methodology that ignoring this error or noise can make downstream analyses biased or unreliable."

Amota Ataneka Doctoral candidate in UC's Quantitative Research Methodologies PhD program

Working under Kelcey's supervision, Ataneka in his dissertation develops new AI-based methods that address these two limitations of AI for causal inference with latent variables. "In other words, we are building a new AI architecture that enables researchers to utilize the predictive power of machine learning models while integrating the theory-driven principles of causal inference and psychometrics."

If this sounds like potentially world-changing research to you, you're in the good company of the National Academy of Education, whose Spencer Dissertation Fellowship provided a prestigious high point for Ataneka's academic journey thus far. He's grateful for the financial component of the award, of course, but he's equally excited to travel to Washington, D.C. for two professional development retreats, where he will meet top researchers in the field and collaborate with them.

"This is the ultimate achievement of my life," he says.

Working with machine learning, Ataneka finds himself right in the heart of an exuberant industry, and his career options have expanded in a world being transformed by AI. "If I go to a conference, many people tell me You should consider industry as well," he says. "Because I'm doing machine learning work. I'm open to it, but my main aim is academia. I want to stay in that."

All these years later, in a story that spans continents and technological advancements, Amota Ataneka still wants to be a professor. And when he completes his doctoral program next year, he'll be on his way to a dream that started with a couple of coconuts and a shared TV screen on a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean.

Featured image at top: Amota Ataneka, recipient of one of only 35 NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowships, sits outside of Teachers-Dyer Complex on the UC campus. Photo/CECH Marketing

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