Artificial Intelligence in Education
Artificial Intelligence in Education: the Potential and the Challenge
First: A word about presentation format. For the past dozen years, we have been "power-point-less" at the UIS Center for Online Learning, Research and Service. Rather than using a static, aging format, we prefer to create Web pages for our presentations to assure that they are easily accessible, updatable, and always available. Please follow along on your own device (or visit at a later date) to delve more deeply into the links and videos that interest you.
Now, some definitions:
- Artificial Intelligence - the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. (https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/artificial%20intelligence
- Machine Learning - Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can access data and use it... learn for themselves. [https://expertsystem.com/machine-learning-definition/
- Deep Learning - In practical terms, deep learning is just a subset of machine learning. In fact, deep learning technically is machine learning and functions in a similar way (hence why the terms are sometimes loosely interchanged). However, its capabilities are different. While basic machine learning models do become progressively better at whatever their function is, but they still need some guidance. If an AI algorithm returns an inaccurate prediction, then an engineer has to step in and make adjustments. With a deep learning model, an algorithm can determine on its own if a prediction is accurate or not through its own neural network. https://www.zendesk.com/blog/machine-learning-and-deep-learning/
- Algorithm - In computing, an algorithm is a precise list of operations that could be done by a Turing machine. For the purpose of computing, algorithms are written in pseudocode, flow charts, or programming languages. . https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm [Ray - example Python]
- Supervised and Unsupervised Learning - In a supervised learning model, the algorithm learns on a labeled dataset, providing an answer key that the algorithm can use to evaluate its accuracy on training data. An unsupervised model, in contrast, provides unlabeled data that the algorithm tries to make sense of by extracting features and patterns on its own. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/08/02/supervised-unsupervised-learning/
- Reinforcement Learning - In this kind of machine learning, AI agents are attempting to find the optimal way to accomplish a particular goal, or improve performance on a specific task. As the agent takes action that goes toward the goal, it receives a reward. The overall aim: predict the best next step to take to earn the biggest final reward. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/08/02/supervised-unsupervised-learning/
Please Note: For UIS leadership in AI vision, machine learning, deep learning, computer-aided detection/diagnosis and big data analytics, Professor of Computer Science Yanhui Guo, was recently named the University Scholar for 2019. The award is considered the University of Illinois system's highest faculty honor, recognizing outstanding teaching and scholarship.
http://spotlight.uis.edu/2019/10/assistant-professor-of-computer-science.html
Our Path in this Presentation
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Some Selected Exampes (all are rapidly evolving)
Considering the impact of Student Access to AI in Assignments
Ashok Goel - Jill Watson and Impact on At-Scale Learning
Student Engagement Predicted and Facilitated by AI
Personalized Learning Powered by AI
Online Learning Powered by AI
Quantum Powered AI ~ Where Our World Changes
Added Bonus - Entanglement
How to Keep Up with All of This!
Artificial Intelligence (AI) vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning - Skymind
You can think of deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence as a set of Russian dolls nested within each other, beginning with the smallest and working out. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, and machine learning is a subset of AI, which is an umbrella term for any computer program that does something smart. In other words, all machine learning is AI, but not all AI is machine learning, and so forth.
https://skymind.ai/wiki/ai-vs-machine-learning-vs-deep-learning
Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Applications, Promise and Perils, and Ethical Questions - EDUCAUSE Review
What are the benefits and challenges of using artificial intelligence to promote student success, improve retention, streamline enrollment, and better manage resources in higher education? AI is affecting all aspects of higher education: administration, teaching, assessment, student performance and more.
A sampling of areas where artificial intelligence is emerging that will affect higher ed
AI musicians have emerged - Aiva https://youtu.be/HAfLCTRuh7U and https://youtu.be/gA03iyI3yEA, with voiced singing https://youtu.be/4MKAf6YX_7M , and more - they have a following! Impact is coming for music education.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/auxuman-ai-album/
Saraj Raval explains how it is done:
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AI that summarizes research for faculty and students.
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AI essay graders have been around for some years; they keep getting better and better.
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AI passes 12th grade science test; not just regurgitating facts, this test requires cognitive reasoning:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/13/20863269/ai-aristo-science-test-allen-institute
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EssayBot will write your student essays - perhaps not an "A" - but credible.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/4/15/18311367/essaybot-ai-homework-passing
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Toward AI that learns to write - well.
http://news.mit.edu/2019/toward-artificial-intelligence-that-learns-to-write-code-0614
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You are reading AI-written reports every day (many are written from AI-gathered research as well) - in Bloomberg (1/3 of all reports), Washington Post, Forbes, Guardian, Associated Press and many more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial-intelligence-journalism-robots.html
https://techhq.com/2019/09/writing-and-research-tools-the-future-of-the-newsroom/
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Poetry and other creative writing by AI.
https://www.vox.com/2019/5/15/18623134/openai-language-ai-gpt2-poetry-try-it
Trying out the Open AI Writing software.
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NSF Creates AI-Powered Innovation Program - Sara Friedman, Campus Technology
The new funding opportunity will distribute approximately $120 million in 2020 to fund planning grants and up to six research institutes focused on advanced research powered by artificial intelligence. The National Science Foundation has announced a new joint federal program to fund research focused on artificial intelligence at colleges, universities and nonprofit or nonacademic organizations focused on educational or research activities. The National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program expects to award approximately $120 million in 2020 to fund planning grants and up to six research institutes.
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/10/10/nsf-creates-ai-powered-innovation-program.aspx
Reminder: AI will most likely have much greater impact in a much different way than what we might be assuming today
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/10/17/the-ai-enabled-future/#51a711973339
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10 Powerful Women Leaders Discuss Keeping AI Safe for Humanity
https://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/340907
Consider this:
The era of the AI student assistant is arriving in which the tools and abilities desribed above will be openly available to all of our students to conduct research papers and case study analyses:
"AI (or Alexa, or Google or ...) I have a research paper due at 3 pm this afternoon for my Epidemiology class. Below is the assignment: send me an electronic version and print out two hard copies by 2:30.
- Epidemiology Assignment 2 (sample from the CDC)
Analysis of 2007 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data from two geographically diverse US states
Assignment Instructions:
Become familiar with the codebook and the variables included in the provided BRFSS dataset.
Based on the available variables, propose research questions and a testable hypothesis.
Review the literature for relevant studies to collect background information on the issue or topic selected
Download and import the dataset into the statistical software program to be used for the assignment. Use the program’s help file for instructions on importing the data if needed. Data should be cleaned prior to analysis.
Analyze the variables of interest to determine the answers to the research questions and in order to evaluate the hypothesis.
Write a short paper (3-4 pages) that introduces the issue considered, the research questions and hypothesis, describes the literature reviewed, and summarizes the analytical findings.
How should we change our assignment models to reflect the new AI realities?
The Interactive, Digital Graduate Assistant Enables Support and Engagement with Very Large Classes
Can Artificial Intelligence Predict Student Engagement?
Researchers at the University of Montreal are partnering with the award-winning education technology company, Classcraft, to explore the use of artificial intelligence to measure student engagement.... “What we want to be able to do is to help interpret that data and to be able to understand what’s happening in the classroom and from there to be able to make recommendations to teachers and principals and students about how they can course-correct their practices to have better outcomes,” Young told Edweek.
https://www.thetechedvocate.org/can-artificial-intelligence-predict-student-engagement/
Personalized, Adaptive Learning Empowered by Rich Student Data Fed Artificial Intelligence
A Proposed Model AI Governance Framework - Personal Data Protection Commission (1/23/19)
The PDPC presents the first edition of A Proposed Model AI Governance Framework (Model Framework) - an accountability-based framework to help chart the language and frame the discussions around harnessing AI in a responsible way. The Model Framework translates ethical principles into practical measures that can be implemented by organisations deploying AI solutions at scale. Through the Model Framework, we aim to promote AI adoption while building consumer confidence and trust in providing their personal data for AI.
https://www.pdpc.gov.sg/resources/model-ai-gov
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How does society create an ethics guide for AI?
Ramin Vatanparast, Venture Beat
Because AI is so comprehensive and covers several industries, we find ourselves asking obscure questions such as “Do we need to legalize predictive AI policing?” or “How do we iron out biases from algorithms that determine job promotions?” With these questions arising, the key one that remains unanswered surrounds ethics. How do we ensure that AI technologies are ethically designed? To answer this question, there are essentially four aspects that dictate the result: the dilemma, the impact, adoption, and institutionalization.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/10/18/how-does-society-create-an-ethics-guide-for-ai/
How AI is Ushering in Disruptions in Online Learning
Rohan Krishna, Business World Education
All over the globe, learners – whether school going children, college students, professionals or those seeking to acquire new skills – are looking for faster, better and more engaging ways to learn. A USD 100 billion dollar industry has sprung up online around these needs, providing a multitude of ways learners can get the knowledge and skills they seek using modern technologies and the internet. The application of AI in learning can broadly be classified into automation of (parts of) the learning experience itself as well as gaining insights from the process that can be ploughed back into it for improvement. Here are 5 advancements in this space that insiders are watching:
Transforming Online Learning With Artificial Intelligence
Aswin Pranam, Forbes
Beyond just identification of preferences, the platforms can also break down long-form lectures and reading assignments into smaller, atomic components that are easily digestible. For international students, the language barrier may complicate progress, but cutting-edge research in text translation and machine learning aims to create deep-learning systems that can translate English lectures into the student’s native tongue. Similar technologies in voice recognition and text summarization can transcribe an entire lecture with stunning accuracy and reduce paragraphs of text into just the relevant bullet points for review. Machine learning algorithms can similarly be deployed over a course curriculum to flag areas of bias, complexity, and ambiguity for closer review by the instructor.... The question of whether this field will be disrupted by a tech company, university, or research organization is still up for debate.
No discussion of AI is complete without considering the impact of quantum computing
Quantum Computing will enable advance AI in ways we have yet to full understand, however, we know it will allow incredibly massive datasets to be analyzed in the blink of an eye. It will bring breakthroughs in fields such as meteorology, medicine, and education where we can assemble massive-scale data that can be combed for causality, prediction, and previously unrecognized connections.
Quantum Computing Is Poised to Change Everything
Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
It is truly rare that an advancement comes along that changes every aspect of society; quantum computing is poised to do just that in the 2020s. Do you recall Moore’s law? That’s the axiom developed by Gordon Moore some two dozen years ago that the processing power of computers would double every 18 months to two years. Now, quantum computing has ushered in Hartmut Neven’s law. His law predicting growth in quantum computing power is one that is doubly exponential. That is two to an exponent of two to a second increasing exponent. Charted on a graph, that growth rate appears to become nearly vertical.
Quantum Computing is on the Verge of Supercharging AI
The advent of quantum computing will fuel a "quantum" leap in artificial intelligence. The Google 54 qubit computer just claimed computing supremacy over the previous fastest computer in the world, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge. "Purportedly, Google’s Sycamore quantum processor, using 54-qubits, performed calculations in 200 seconds that would have taken today’s supercomputers over 10,000 years to complete. The power and potential of such an achievement are awe-inspiring, even if there are no obvious practical applications today." Note: IBM disputes the claim . IBM has their own 53 qubit computer.
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Hello quantum world! Google publishes landmark quantum supremacy claim - Nature 10/23/10
Scientists at Google say that they have achieved quantum supremacy, a long-awaited milestone in quantum computing. The announcement, published in Nature on 23 October, follows a leak of an early version of the paper five weeks ago, which Google did not comment on at the time. In a world first, a team led by John Martinis, an experimental physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Google in Mountain View, California, says that its quantum computer carried out a specific calculation that is beyond the practical capabilities of regular, ‘classical’ machines1. The same calculation would take even the best classical supercomputer 10,000 years to complete, Google estimates.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03213-z
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Here's Why Quantum Computing Supremacy Matters - Futurism
American theoretical physicist John Preskill first coined the term “quantum supremacy” back in 2012. In a column for Quanta Magazine published earlier this month, he defined it as “the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, regardless of whether those tasks are useful.” It’s important to note that quantum supremacy doesn’t mean a quantum computer can solve a task that’s impossible for a classical computer. “Given enough time… classical computers and quantum computers can solve the same problems,” Thomas Wong of Creighton University told Quanta Magazine.
https://futurism.com/why-quantum-supremacy-matters
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Bravo for Google’s ‘quantum supremacy.’ Here’s what needs to happen next. - Chad Rigetti, Forbes
Google’s demonstration marks the first time that quantum mechanical properties have been harnessed at a large-enough scale and with accurate-enough control to go beyond what traditional computing can do. However, much more work is needed in the next few years to extend and translate this computational power to solve practical and valuable problems. While that journey will be complex, three essential things need to happen to get there.
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Quantum Information and AI - Alex Moltzau, Towards Data Science
“In physics and computer science, quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information theory, and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques.” “Quantum neural networks (QNNs) are neural network models which are based on the principles of quantum mechanics. There are two different approaches to QNN research, one exploiting quantum information processing to improve existing neural network models (sometimes also vice versa), and the other one searching for potential quantum effects in the brain.”
https://towardsdatascience.com/quantum-computing-and-ai-789fc9c28c5b
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Speed Demons: How Quantum Computing Could Change Education - By Jeffrey R. Young Oct 29, 2019
Meet Alexey Galda, a research assistant professor at the University of Chicago, who specializes in trying new methods of quantum computing. In his spare time, he’s an avid wingsuit flyer, and he’s actually in the Guinness World Records for achieving the fastest horizontal speed in one of these real-life superhero outfits. He was going over 200 miles per hour.And to bring the conversation back down to earth, we talked with Ray Schroeder, the associate vice chancellor for online learning at the University of Illinois at Springfield, to hear what these new super-fast computers might mean for education.
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-10-29-speed-demons-how-quantum-computing-could-change-education
Additional Readings
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-milestone-quantum-standardization.html
https://gizmodo.com/google-confirms-achieving-quantum-supremacy-1839288099
https://www.verdict.co.uk/quantum-computing-2019/
https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-preskill-explains-quantum-supremacy-20191002/
https://enterprisetalk.com/quick-bytes/googles-breakthrough-quantum-computing/
Advances at Johns Hopkins include identifying new superconductor material for qubits
https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/quantum-computing-john-hopkins
Quantum Computing in Higher Ed
Quantum computing is not an incremental step in the advancement of computing. It is - pardon the phrase - a quantum leap!
According to the Financial Times report, the paper said that Google’s quantum processor was able to perform a calculation in three minutes and 20 seconds that would take today’s most advanced supercomputer, known as Summit, around 10,000 years.
Quantum Computing Roundup - HPC
Advances are taking place in the blink of an eye. Universities are assisting in the development and refinement of ever-larger quantum computers. Applications in education - as will almost every field - are astounding. Unimaginably large datasets and nearly unfathomably complex algorithms combined with superposition and entanglement features to make these computers the key component in changing civilization and life as we know it.
Einstein called it "Spooky": Quantum Entanglement
It affords connected actions at speeds exceeding the speed of light by means we do not yet fully understand. It opens the door to a whole new level of privacy and connectivity. Quantum entanglement is thought to be one of the trickiest concepts in science, but the core issues are simple. And once understood, entanglement opens up a richer understanding of concepts such as the “many worlds” of quantum theory.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/entanglement-made-simple-20160428/
https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/what-is-quantum-entanglement
Saraj Raval pulls it all together:
Did you "get" the shoe/hotdog and "my mom is from Kenya" references in the first 40 seconds! If so, congratulations, you pass the Quantum Test!!!
How can you keep up with the daily developments and trends?
Ray's Daily Curated Reading Lists and Social Media. Blogs with daily updates on the field of online / continuing learning in higher education
- UPCEA Professional, Continuing and Online Education Update http://continuingedupdate.blogspot.com/
- Online Learning Update http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/onlinelearning/blogger.html/
- Recession Reality in Higher Education http://recessionreality.blogspot.com/
- Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/blogger.html/
- UIS OER Blog https://uisoerblog.blogspot.com/
- Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/rayschroeder
- https://twitter.com/rayschroeder
Contact Ray
rschr1@uis.edu ~ rayschroeder@gmail.com - ray@upcea.edu
Associate Vice Chancellor for Online, Professor Emeritus
University of Illinois Springfield
Senior Fellow, University Professional and Continuing Education Assn.
217-206-7531
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