Curriculum Vitae — Robin Jephthah Rajarathinam

Radicality Ministries

Curriculum Development & AI Researcher

Illinois, US LeadTamara Rowe

• Designed and developed Intimacy with God: 90-Day Teen Journal, a 188-page devotional workbook for young adults — architecting daily content progression around evidence-based instructional design and producing all interior layouts, typography, and front/back cover artwork in Canva.
• Revamped the Radicality Ministries Squarespace site by unifying design, typography, and color systems across all pages and shipping SEO improvements that drove a 10% increase in site impressions in the first month; iterating on structured user feedback collected from newcomers, churchgoers, and donors.
• Prompt-engineered LLMs (Claude, Canva AI) to automate curriculum and content generation; configured Claude Cowork scheduled tasks to streamline recurring production workflows across the ministry's educational pipeline.

INVITE AI Institute

Graduate Research Assistant

Champaign, IL

• Pioneered the use of LLaVA (Large Language and Vision Assistant) to automatically detect non-verbal cues from video, enabling holistic analysis of collaboration.
• Prompt-engineered LLMs to automate detection of collaborative behaviors from speech transcripts — eliminating manual coding while achieving accuracy > 0.85 for most behaviors.
• Validated a noise-adaptive neural network that fuses audio, linguistic, and video data to maintain detection of student collaboration states even when modality quality drops.
• Improved facial-recognition accuracy in group settings by 400% by deploying a 360-degree camera for superior data collection.

CoLearn Lab · UIUC

Graduate Research Assistant

Champaign, IL PIDr. Emma Mercier

• Developed a late-fusion Random Forest model in Python that achieved an F1-score > 0.8 in predicting on-task collaborative behaviors from video, audio, and log data.
• Identified the unique predictive power of each data stream and advanced the methodology by introducing group-wise cross-validation and SMOTE to ensure model robustness and address class imbalance.
• Investigated the impact of spatial pedagogy on student help-seeking behaviors by tracking teacher positional data through fisheye camera footage with OpenCV.

Immersive Data Lab · UIUC

Graduate Research Assistant

Champaign, IL PIDr. Jina Kang

• Led a user-centered redesign of the HoloOrbits astronomy simulation, enhancing UX based on usability testing with students and teachers.
• Fine-tuned a Small Language Model (Microsoft Phi-3) on synthetic data to replicate a GPT-4o tutor agent — achieving 85% result replication while identifying systematic model hallucinations.
• Applied ONA & ENA network analysis to visually map and quantify the link between students' joint attention and successful collaboration.

Siebel Center for Design · UIUC

Graduate Research Assistant

Champaign, IL

• Designed and implemented an infrastructure that streamlined interactions among K-12 teachers, engineering graduate TAs, and Teaching Catalysts (education seniors) to develop lesson plans together.
• Delivered key insights for program improvement by designing, deploying, and analyzing survey data from graduate teaching assistants to evaluate the effectiveness of this new teaching ecosystem.

CoLearn Lab · UIUC

Graduate Research Assistant — Speech Analytics

Champaign, IL PIDr. Emma Mercier

• Processed group and individual audio data from undergraduate collaborative sessions using the openSMILE toolkit.
• Analyzed non-lexical features to elucidate patterns in student collaboration and teacher–student interactions.

Embodied & Immersive Technologies Group · UIUC

Graduate Research Assistant

Champaign, IL PIDr. Robb Lindgren

• Orchestrated the collection of a complex, mixed-media dataset (CEASAR) from students using HoloLens 2, creating a rich repository for embodied collaboration research.
• Refined and implemented behavioral coding schemes to analyze how physical gestures function as key indicators of embodied collaborative learning.

CoLearn Lab · UIUC

Graduate Research Assistant

Champaign, IL PIDr. Emma Mercier

• Designed and implemented robust behavioral coding schemes for the CSTEPS project to systematically quantify instructor–student interactions and their effect on student learning.
• Applied advanced statistical modeling (Confirmatory Factor Analysis & Path Analysis) to validate a theoretical framework, proving a significant link between teaching interactions and student outcomes.

CoLearn Lab · UIUC

Research Fellow

Champaign, IL PIDr. Emma Mercier

• Designed a 50-minute research activity for Solid Mechanics, orchestrating the collection and manual annotation of multimodal data from longitudinal student-group sessions to create a foundational dataset on collaborative behaviors.
• Authored a library of theory-backed collaboration prompts for the CSTEPS teacher tool, building the underlying database that helps instructors facilitate more effective student teamwork.

EPSY 405 / PSYC 465 · Personality & Social Development

Teaching Assistant · Undergraduate / Graduate · Hybrid

College of Education, UIUC InstructorDr. Nidia Ruedas-Gracia

CI 550 / EPSY 550 · Methods of Educational Inquiry

Teaching Assistant · Graduate · Hybrid

College of Education, UIUC InstructorDr. Kary Zarate

TAM 251 · Introductory Solid Mechanics

Teaching Assistant · Undergraduate

Grainger College of Engineering, UIUC InstructorDr. Mariana Silva

TAM 251 · Introductory Solid Mechanics

Graduate Student Lecturer · Undergraduate

Grainger College of Engineering, UIUC MentorDr. Mariana Silva

TAM 435 · Intermediate Fluid Mechanics

Teaching Assistant · Undergraduate / Graduate

Grainger College of Engineering, UIUC InstructorDr. Moshe Matalon

TAM 210 / 211 · Statics

Teaching Assistant · Undergraduate

Grainger College of Engineering, UIUC InstructorDr. Mariana Silva

Conference Reviewer

AERA · CSCL · ICLS · LSGSC · LAK · EDM

Co-chair, College of Education Graduate Student Conference

Led a team of 15 organizing a 200+ attendee academic conference

UIUC

Graduate Student Representative, Faculty Search Committee

Open-rank CS Education faculty search

UIUC

WPGU Radio Segment

Featured in a 30-minute segment on collaborative learning in modern education

WPGU 107.1 FM, Champaign IL

Event Schedule Committee Chair, Graduate Student Conference

Oversaw the conference schedule, balancing topics and speakers

UIUC

Review Committee Member, Learning Sciences Graduate Student Conference

Evaluated and selected academic papers for presentation

UIUC

Coordinator, PINNACLE Technical Symposium

Nation-level symposium for mechanical engineers

Anna University, Chennai

Workshop Organizer, “Auto-Anatomy” at Kurukshetra’12

Techno-management fest

Anna University, Chennai