What does Artificial Intelligence mean for education? Find out here 

Computer scientist, Nikhila Ravi, believes that AI could solve some of the challenges facing education
OpenEd.ai awarded up to $19K in prizes for open-source AI projects
OpenEd.ai awarded up to $19K in prizes for open-source AI projects

Today, half our lives run on artificial intelligence. From Siri managing our calendars to Facebook suggesting friends to add, virtually every field has benefited from advances in artificial intelligence. To develop policy frameworks for Open Data and Data-privacy in an AI-dominated world, OpenEd.ai, a non-profit organisation promoting AI for Education, partnered with NITI Aayog (Government of India) to conduct the AI for Education Global HackWeek at IIT Delhi from July 28 to August 11, 2017. We caught up with Nikhila Ravi, Co-director, OpenEd.ai to talk about the challenges that AI in education should work to address. Excerpts:
 
What role can AI play in changing the state of higher education? 
AI can analyse from a student’s resume what skills they possess and from job descriptions what skills a job requires. Then, it can match students who have the required skills to their jobs. AI can learn from past student exams/essays and score future exams/essays, thus saving professors and teaching assistants several hours of work.

AI World: Nikhila Ravi is a computer scientist with a background from Harvard University
 
 

Is AI the key to personalised education?
AI is the key to delivering personalised education and is one of the most exciting applications in the education space currently. The same way teachers gradually build an understanding of how each student learns and their goals, student interactions on an AI-learning platform can be used to build statistical models of student knowledge which encompasses factors such as learning style, aptitude, and interests. 
 
How can AI be applied in a classroom?
In both real and virtual classrooms, AI-based solutions can be employed to enable quality education. AI-enabled grading systems can help reduce this workload as well as facilitate other tasks such as plagiarism detection. 

The Jill Watson Teaching Assistant bot created by Professor Ashok Goel at Georgia Tech can be used to supplement teachers for answering questions, with the advantage of providing help outside of the classroom

Nikhila Ravi, Co-director, OpenEd.ai


 
Is there anything human educators can provide that AI cannot?

Yes. Humans are good at ‘general intelligence’ while AI is capable of ‘specific/narrow intelligence’. AI in education will not replace humans, rather, it will augment them. It will enable humans to scale. This is because building an AI that can provide education at the level of human instructors requires lots of data and data in such abundance and specificity is unavailable.
 
Are there any AI applications for public safety that college campuses might benefit from?
AI and Data Sciences can infer from on-campus crime data the factors that lead to violence and where violence might occur in the future. Furthermore, Image/Video Recognition and Object Detection AI algorithms applied to security camera audio/video streams can identify unwelcome guests, and automatically notify the respective authorities as a preventative measure.

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