Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Georgia Tech's Ashkok Goel says automated 'nano tutors' will take-off in education - Tim Dodd, Financial Review

Georgia Tech artificial intelligence pioneer Ashkok Goel says his ground-breaking use of artificial intelligence to interact with students will soon be cheap and widely available. Earlier this year Professor Goel famously introduced a "nano tutor", dubbed Jill Watson, to answer the questions in the online forum for students in his course at the US university, called Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence. For over a month students didn't realise they were talking to a robot teaching assistant (TA) rather than a real one. "We did not tell the students Jill Watson was an AI [artificial intelligence]. As far as they were concerned Jill Watson was just another human TA," he told a Sydney conference last week. After learning that one of their teaching assistants was a bot, students were both amazed and receptive. http://www.afr.com/news/policy/education/georgia-techs-ashkok-goel-says-automated-nano-tutors-will-takeoff-in-education-20161103-gshuth