Professor Surprises Students With AI Teacher Assistant (smh.com.au)

An anonymous reader writes: Jill Watson is an artificial intelligence bot, it is also Ashok Goel's teaching assistant. Ashok Goel, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech, hired Jill Watson to answer questions online for his students so that his teaching staff wasn't so overworked. On average, Goel and his staff receive more than 10,000 questions from students online each semester. So he decided to use IBM Watson, an artificial intelligence system designed to answer questions. After training and tweaking it for months, he was able to spit out good enough answers. Originally, Goel didn't reveal Watson's true identity to his students until after the last final exam was turned in at the end of the class. Students were amazed. "I feel like I am part of history because of Jill and this class!" wrote one student in the class's online forum. "Just when I wanted to nominate Jill Watson as an outstanding TA in the CIOS survey!" said another. Goel is now working to bring the bot to as as many education centers are possible. He expects the bot's question-answering abilities to help online classes, where there's little engagement with a human instructor.

Comments

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

So did that thing just accidentally pass the Turing test?

Re:My wife asked a key question

[sir-gold]

The answer is Socialism

People have seen this day coming ever since the industrial revolution first starting taking jobs away from farm workers. This is why some countries are now looking at Universal Basic Income, because mechanization of tasks has made us TOO efficient, and there just isn't enough work to go around.

Re:Fail

[PopeRatzo]

While true, the cost of having a mathematician set up the process and evaluate the output is trivial compared to the cost of having someone work through those equations by hand, and someone else error check everything, and then redo the calculations several times because of trivial errors.

First, it's a misconception that all mathematicians only work by hand. Second, when you say, "set up the process", you are being very vague and almost dismissive. That "process" you refer to is the work of the mathematician.

Do you think computers come from the factory being able to correct for errors in a wave function? No, it's because mathematicians came up with KdV and BBM and all sorts of other elegant methods of doing it and then let the computers do the busy work that a computer is able to do these things.

Without mathematicians, engineers would just be piling rocks on one another, hoping it turns into a bridge.