Grad students didn't know TA was a robot.

[raccoon]

'Jill Watson' now answers students' questions with 97% certainty

On the Internet, "nobody knows you're a dog," as the old meme goes, and today, the same can increasingly be said of robots.
“The world is full of online classes, and they’re plagued with low retention rates,” said Ashok Goel, a Georgia Tech professor who teaches a class entitled Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence. “One of the main reasons many students drop out is because they don’t receive enough teaching support. We created Jill as a way to provide faster answers and feedback.”...

The class is a core requirement of Georgia Tech’s online master’s program in computer science, and it tends to draw a lot of questions from students. It's offered every semester, and each time, the 300 or so students enrolled post roughly 10,000 messages in the course's online forums, Goel estimates....“One of the secrets of online classes is that the number of questions increases if you have more students, but the number of different questions doesn’t really go up,” Goel said. “Students tend to ask the same questions over and over again.”...

...today Jill can answer questions with 97 percent certainty. Initially, the human TAs would upload her successful responses to the students, but by the end of March, Jill didn’t need any assistance: She wrote to the class directly if she was 97 percent positive her answer was correct.

The big reveal didn't happen until late April, when Goel informed his AI students that they had actually been interacting with a bot all semester. One reportedly said her mind was "blown." Since then some students have organized an alumni forum to learn about new developments with Jill after the class ends; another group has launched an open-source project to replicate her.


http://www.computerworld.com/article/3067792/data-analytics/these-grad-students-didnt-know-their-teaching-assistant-was-a-robot.html?token=%23tk.CTWNLE_nlt_computerworld_emerging_technologies_2016-05-11&idg_eid=b74513f8ed59a07f430b7b2a74e910d8&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Computerworld%20Emerging%20Technologies%202016-05-11&utm_term=computerworld_emerging_technologies#tk.CW_nlt_computerworld_emerging_technologies_2016-05-11

[Nuclear Unicorn]

1. I've met people and didn't know they weren't robots.

[raccoon]

3. It's only going to get worse. LOL.

[Blue_Tires]

2. Why do they say 'robot'

instead of program, algorithm or something?

[raccoon]

4. Good point, to me "robot" implies something physical that moves around, not software, something

that exists electronically.

I guess "robot" sounds more dramatic.

[6chars]

5. This sounds very useful

If a student is confused "when is the homework due" or "what pages are we supposed to read for Tuesday" or "what was my grade on the first midterm" or "is Ch 5 going to be on the test" etc., they don't need a pat on the head, they just need a quick answer. Getting the info they need quickly and correctly will help them succeed. If they need to talk to a live TA, that ought to be possible. But that will be more likely to be effective if TAs are relieved of all the mundane emails.

[gratuitous]

6. My college instructor friend has an autotext: RTFS

Okay, not really. But he'd really like one.

[font color="white"]For the slowcoaches, that means "Read the fucking syllabus."