Benyamin Tabarsi

Game2Learn Lab

Venture IV, Suite 400

1730 Varsity Dr, Raleigh, NC

Hello! I am a PhD candidate in Computer Science at North Carolina State University (expected May 2027), working with Dr. Tiffany Barnes and Dr. DK Xu in the Game2Learn and GIC labs.

My dissertation, Toward Human-AI Co-Intelligence in Computing Education, studies how students, developers, and educators actually collaborate with AI systems, and how to design those systems to be trustworthy, adaptive, and pedagogically grounded. I combine mixed-methods and human-centered research with educational data mining to understand where learners struggle, then build and evaluate tools that help. The same questions carry into health communication, where responsible AI design matters just as much.

So far this work has produced 16 peer-reviewed publications, a Best Technical Demonstration Award at AAAI 2025 for MerryQuery, and a Best Research Paper Award at IEEE VL/HCC 2024 for Jigsaw.

What I’m building

MerryQuery: A GenAI-powered educational assistant that grounds its answers in course materials and instructor preferences. Deployed across three semesters of an introductory MATLAB course reaching 750+ students, and used as a development platform in a graduate education course.
HelpLens: An eight-dimension, theory-informed framework and annotated dataset for comparing how teaching staff and LLMs answer students’ programming help requests, applied to 172 paired responses.
SafeTalk: An expert-informed AI coaching system that helps parents rehearse sensitive health conversations with their teens, adapting coaching principles to a high-stakes, nonprofessional setting.
ExLAIM: An ExLENT-funded program I lead and coordinate that pairs student developers with K-12 teachers to co-design classroom AI tools.
LLMs in Classrooms: Professional development that prepares K-12 educators to integrate generative AI into their teaching.

I also care a lot about mentoring and teaching: I have guided 20 undergraduate researchers, 3 master’s students, and 11 K-12 teachers, and I teach introductory computing as a Preparing the Professoriate and Mentored Teaching Fellow.

I am always eager to collaborate with researchers building tools that make learning easier and more effective. If you work on educational technology, human-centered AI, or computing education, feel free to reach out!

news

Aug 07, 2026	Our study of how early-adopter developers integrate LLMs across the software development lifecycle is now published in Empirical Software Engineering! 📄
Jul 02, 2026	Our paper on the human-centered design of LLM-powered educational chatbots with secondary teachers appeared at AI-HCI 2026! 📄
Jun 27, 2026	Our paper on adversarial assignment perturbation and student help-seeking in GenAI chatbot use led by Sam Gilson was presented at AIED 2026! 🎉
Jun 01, 2026	Kicked off ExLAIM this summer, an ExLENT-funded program I lead that pairs student developers with K–12 teachers to co-design classroom AI tools, this year with 5 undergraduate researchers and 9 teachers! 🤝
Mar 05, 2026	Our systematic literature review on student-facing LLM tools in computing education is available as a preprint and under review at Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence! 📄
Feb 18, 2026	A condensed version of MerryQuery’s usage analysis has been accepted at SIGCSE 2026 and is now available! 📄
Jan 13, 2026	Started as a Teaching Fellow for Introduction to Programming (CSC 113), a 250+ student MATLAB course, through NC State’s Preparing the Professoriate program! 🎓
Dec 18, 2025	Honored to have been selected for the Mentored Teaching Fellowship! 🏆
Nov 21, 2025	Happy to be on the panel for the Introduction to MATLAB course! 🎤
Nov 13, 2025	Excited to be invited to DELTA’s roundtable discussion on AI in education! 🎉
Sep 25, 2025	Excited to be invited to give a talk about MerryQuery in an NLP course at Utah State University! 🎤
Sep 01, 2025	Excited to be featured in AIHub’s AAAI interview series discussing my PhD journey and human-centered AI research! 🎉
Jul 28, 2025	Proud to have mentored Jayani Sivakumar and Susanna Quayle on MerryQuery improvements over the Summer! 🌟
Jul 02, 2025	Excited to share my appearance on the Root Access Podcast discussing MerryQuery and AI in education! 🎙️
Apr 16, 2025	Our study on early-adopter developers’ LLM integration across the software development lifecycle is now live on arXiv! 📄
Apr 16, 2025	NC State Computer Science featured our AAAI demonstration award! Grateful for the department’s support! ✨
Apr 01, 2025	Thrilled to be accepted into NC State’s Preparing the Professoriate (PTP) program! 🎓
Mar 10, 2025	Received AAAI 2025 Best Demonstration Award for MerryQuery! 🏆
Feb 04, 2025	Honored to have been awarded the AAAI 2025 Travel Grant!
Nov 19, 2024	Our paper, “MerryQuery: A Trustworthy LLM-Powered Tool Providing Personalized Support for Educators and Students,” has been accepted to the AAAI-25 Demo Track!
Nov 02, 2024	My research proposal, “Developing LLM-Powered Trustworthy Agents for Personalized Learning Support,” has been accepted to the AAAI-25 Doctoral Consortium!
Sep 04, 2024	Won Best Research Paper Award at IEEE VL/HCC 2024 for our tool for programming problem decomposition!
Aug 29, 2024	Gave a presentation of MerryQuery, our educational AI-based platform, for an ECI 519 class
Aug 12, 2024	Presented our paper about scaffolding at ICER 2024!
Aug 02, 2024	Completed the LearnLab summer school at Carnegie Mellon for the second time—an incredible experience!

selected publications

EMSE

LLMs’ Reshaping of People, Processes, Products, and Society in Software Development: A Qualitative Exploration with Early Adopters

Benyamin Tabarsi^*, Heidi Reichert^*, Sam Gilson, and 3 more authors

Empirical Software Engineering, Aug 2026

* Equal contribution. Published online August 7, 2026.

arXiv Bib HTML

@article{tabarsi2026llms,
  title = {LLMs' Reshaping of People, Processes, Products, and Society in Software Development: A Qualitative Exploration with Early Adopters},
  author = {Tabarsi, Benyamin and Reichert, Heidi and Gilson, Sam and Limke, Ally and Kuttal, Sandeep and Barnes, Tiffany},
  journal = {Empirical Software Engineering},
  volume = {32},
  number = {1},
  pages = {21},
  month = aug,
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Springer},
  doi = {10.1007/s10664-026-10917-0},
  note = {* Equal contribution. Published online August 7, 2026.},
}

Preprint

Student-Facing LLM Tools in Computing Education: A Systematic Literature Review of Roles, Designs, Evaluations, and Impacts

Benyamin Tabarsi, Tahreem Yasir, Heidi Reichert, and 6 more authors

Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 2026

Under review. Preprint available on TechRxiv.

Bib HTML PDF

@article{tabarsi2026studentfacing,
  title = {Student-Facing LLM Tools in Computing Education: A Systematic Literature Review of Roles, Designs, Evaluations, and Impacts},
  author = {Tabarsi, Benyamin and Yasir, Tahreem and Reichert, Heidi and Tian, Xiaoyi and Gadireddy, Shiva and Dimarco, Clara and Briceno, Daniel and Battestilli, Lina and Barnes, Tiffany},
  journal = {Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence},
  year = {2026},
  note = {Under review. Preprint available on TechRxiv.},
}

SIGCSE

MerryQuery in the Loop: How Students Use and Perceive a GenAI-Powered Assistant in an Introductory Programming Course

Benyamin Tabarsi

In Proceedings of the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2, 2026

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{tabarsi2026merryquery,
  title = {MerryQuery in the Loop: How Students Use and Perceive a GenAI-Powered Assistant in an Introductory Programming Course},
  author = {Tabarsi, Benyamin},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2},
  pages = {1685--1686},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {ACM},
  doi = {10.1145/3770761.3777164},
}

AAAI

MerryQuery: A Trustworthy LLM-Powered Tool Providing Personalized Support for Educators and Students

Benyamin Tabarsi, Aditya Basarkar, Xukun Liu, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Apr 2025

Best Demo Bib HTML PDF Website

Best Technical Demonstration Award at AAAI 2025

@inproceedings{tabarsi2025merryquery,
  title = {MerryQuery: A Trustworthy LLM-Powered Tool Providing Personalized Support for Educators and Students},
  author = {Tabarsi, Benyamin and Basarkar, Aditya and Liu, Xukun and Xu, Dongkuan DK and Barnes, Tiffany},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  volume = {39},
  number = {28},
  pages = {29700--29702},
  month = apr,
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1609/aaai.v39i28.35372},
}

VL/HCC

Jigsaw: A Visual Tool for Decomposing and Planning Programming Problems

Heidi Reichert, Benyamin Tabarsi, Thomas Price, and 1 more author

In 2024 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2024

Best Paper Bib HTML

Best Research Paper Award at IEEE VL/HCC 2024

@inproceedings{reichert2024jigsaw,
  title = {Jigsaw: A Visual Tool for Decomposing and Planning Programming Problems},
  author = {Reichert, Heidi and Tabarsi, Benyamin and Price, Thomas and Barnes, Tiffany},
  booktitle = {2024 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)},
  pages = {236--247},
  year = {2024},
  organization = {IEEE},
  doi = {10.1109/VL/HCC60511.2024.00034},
}

ICER

Scaffolding Novices: Analyzing When and How Parsons Problems Impact Novice Programming in an Integrated Science Assignment

Benyamin Tabarsi, Heidi Reichert, Nicholas Lytle, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research V. 1, 2024

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{tabarsi2024scaffolding,
  title = {Scaffolding Novices: Analyzing When and How Parsons Problems Impact Novice Programming in an Integrated Science Assignment},
  author = {Tabarsi, Benyamin and Reichert, Heidi and Lytle, Nicholas and Catete, Veronica and Barnes, Tiffany},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research V. 1},
  pages = {42--54},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {ACM},
  doi = {10.1145/3632620.3671110},
}