The 10th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, ITS 2010, continued the bi-annual series of top-flight international conferences on the use of advanced educational technologies that are adaptive to users or groups of users. These highly interdisciplinary conferences bring together researchers in the learning sciences, computer science, cognitive or educational psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and linguistics. The theme of the ITS 2010 conference was Bridges to Learning, a theme that connects the scientific content of the conference and the geography of Pittsburgh, the host city. The conference addressed the use of advanced technologies as bridges for learners and facilitators of robust learning outcomes.

We received a total of 186 submissions from 26 countries on 5 continents: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, the UK and USA. We accepted 61 full papers (38%) and 58 short papers. The diversity of the field is reflected in the range of topics represented by the papers submitted, selected by the authors. The most popular topics among the accepted (full and short) papers were: empirical studies of learning with advanced learning technologies (34 accepted papers), educational data mining (EDM) and machine learning (28), evaluation of systems (23), pedagogical agents (21), natural language interaction (20), affect (19), intelligent games (16), pedagogical strategies (15), models of learners, facilitators, groups and communities (15), and domain-specific: mathematics (15). Of course, many papers covered multiple topics.

We are delighted that five outstanding and world-renowned researchers accepted our invitation to give invited talks during the conference. Abstracts of their presentations are included in this set of proceedings. Chee-Kit Looi from the National Institute of Education (Singapore) shared insights into comprehensive initiatives in Singapore’s education system, which involve partnerships between researchers and classroom practice. Stacy Marsella from the Institute of Creative Technologies (University of Southern California) spoke about the role of emotion and emotion modeling in systems with virtual characters. Alexander Renkl from the University of Freiburg (Germany) suggested a way of reconciling theoretical views on learning held by proponents of socio-constructivist approaches with cognitively oriented approaches and discussed implications for the design of ITS. Steven Ritter from Carnegie Learning, Inc. (Pittsburgh, USA) spoke about the third wave of ITS, which takes advantage of the large user base of real-world ITS for purposes of data mining and end-user authoring. Finally, Beverly Woolf, from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, described the emergence of social and caring computer tutors, which respond to both affect and cognition.