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

Fail

[Ol Olsoc]

I've been in American college classrooms. This won't work unless Jill has a thick, unintelligble accent.

Re:Fail

[PopeRatzo]

I've been in American college classrooms. This won't work unless Jill has a thick, unintelligble accent.

Hey, watch it buddy, you're talking about my wife. After decades, she still has her Eastern European accent and teaches grad-level math. Fortunately, by the time they're going for a PhD in math at an American university, the only students left all have thick accents themselves so they don't notice hers. Most of the US students are still struggling with Calculus.

Re:Fail

[PopeRatzo]

Confirmation bias -- you sure that the American students realize that those higher level math courses are only needed if one wants to become a math professor themselves?

Nonsense. Those higher-level math courses are the ones that get used in applied science. For example, my wife's specialty is in numerical analysis and simulation of waves. Used in everything from climate science to wireless communications and acoustics and even nuclear physics.

If you think all math above the level of Calculus is only for academics, then you must be an American.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

So did that thing just accidentally pass the Turing test?

Re:Wow

[stephanruby]

So did that thing just accidentally pass the Turing test?

Pretty much.

Here is an actual transcript of the winning entry.

Student: Where is the homework? I couldn't find it.
TA: That answer is in the Syllabus. Did you not read it?

Student: Ah ok, I found it. I couldn't find the homework in time yesterday. Can I turn in my homework late?
TA: That answer is in the Syllabus. Did you not read it?

Student: I did read it, but I was wondering if you could make an exception.
TA: That answer is in the Syllabus. Did you not read it?

Student: Ok, ok. Thanks anyway.
TA: You're welcome.

Another overhyped chatbot

[GPS Pilot]

From TFA...

Goel and his teaching assistants receive more than 10,000 questions a semester from students on the course's online forum. Sometimes the same questions are asked again and again. Last year he began to wonder if he could automate the burden of answering so many repetitive questions.

The first order of business ought to be updating the course material to answer those frequently-asked-questions, so they don't need to be asked in the first place.

My interactions with professors usually went something like this:

"I don't understand how this answer was arrived at."
Prof scrutinizes the textbook for a while, then says "ah, you have found an error in the text."

I wonder if Jill can handle that kind of interaction with students?

There are many questions Jill can't handle. Those questions were reserved for human teaching assistants.

Ah... the answer is no.

Re:When I was a kid

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I'm quite convinced that education of mathematics at least is going to be transformed by AI tutors. Showing systematic procedures for solving problems and checking students' homeworks, highlighting the mistakes, building a "model" of a particular student's mind and being "aware" of what he in particular struggles with and taking it into consideration in future explanations and custom-generated homeworks are some of the things that should be possible with modern AI systems. Nobody has as much time for you as a computer.