This year, I'll be working as the Lead Developer in Neil Heffernan's Artificial Intelligence Lab, which is part of WPI's Computer Science Department. This lab isn't a traditional lab, they actually make a product! It's called ASSISTments, an intelligent tutoring system that's being used in MA schools today. Undergraduate and graduate students from WPI primarily built it, but Carnegie Mellon also collaborates in research.
We're working on a new version of the system to enable more scaffolding of questions, more question types, and just faster development in general. The current system is written in Java, and we're rebuilding it with Ruby on Rails. Some of the new features we're adding are effort calculations, content feedback, calculator support, content versioning. Check out the progress blog at http://assistment.blogspot.com.
This effort will be a case study for my master's thesis about productizing a research project.