By Sri Ravipati, THE Journal
Amidst back-to-school season, Amazon Education today released TenMarks Writing, a new online curriculum designed to help students improve their writing skills. The company back in 2013 acquired TenMarks, an ed tech startup that allows individuals to develop easy-to-understand mathematics curricula for students. For the last year, Amazon has been working with teachers to develop a writing version of TenMarks that employs the same underlying artificial intelligence technology: natural language processing that can detect spelling and grammatical errors, as well as argument and story structure, and provide students with automatic and differentiated feedback.
September 2, 2017
Amazon Writing Tool Taps AI to Help Students Become Better Writers
B-schools are driving innovation in online learning
by Marco De Novellis, Business Because
The days of whiteboards and ink cartridges are over. Developments in educational technology – or edtech – are revolutionizing the business school experience. irtual Reality (VR) headsets are in classrooms. Big data-crunching devices give students live feedback on their progress. And, with flexibility in high demand, more and more learning is being delivered online. Today, online learning is increasingly seen as a direct alternative to taking a traditional classroom-based course. In a survey of over 2,000 professionals, UK research firm Maturity found that 80% of professionals think online learning can help them further their careers.
5 Examples of Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom
by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate
For years, educators have struggled to help each and every student with their individualized educational needs. That gets incredibly tough in a classroom of twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty students all required to pass the same standardized test, regardless of personal growth. The use of artificial intelligence has the potential to disrupt the traditional and potentially damaging one-size-fits all model of modern teaching. Machine Learning algorithms have already begun helping teachers fill the gaps while indicating which subjects students are struggling with the most. If you think AI and chalkboards don’t go hand-in-hand, we’ll prove you wrong with five examples of classroom-based Artificial Intelligence.
http://www.thetechedvocate.org/5-examples-artificial-intelligence-classroom/
Share on FacebookSeptember 1, 2017
Here’s How Blockchain Will Eliminate Middlemen And Usher in a New Paradigm
by Michael Oved, Futurism
A new paradigm of transaction execution called blockchain could eliminate the need for all of these middlemen. In a blockchain, transactions are verified by distributed nodes, and anyone can join or leave the network as they please without disrupting the network’s ability to form consensus on transactions. Instead of using a single computer to manage transactions, like we do now, we could leverage a global computer. Bitcoin was the first example of a blockchain being used to communicate value globally, with trust and without middlemen, and Ethereum extends the power of the blockchain.
https://futurism.com/blockchain-will-eliminate-middlemen-and-usher-in-a-new-paradigm/
Share on FacebookMicrosoft’s Speech Recognition is Now as Good as a Human Transcriber
by Futurism
Microsoft’s conversational system for speech recognition has achieved a 5.1 percent error rate, its best performance to date and at a level of parity with human transcribers. Next steps include deeper understanding of meaning. Microsoft recently announced that its conversational system for speech recognition has achieved a 5.1 percent error rate, its best performance to date. This beats the 5.9 percent error rate achieved in October of 2016 and put its accuracy at the same level as professional human transcribers, who can listen to text multiple times, access cultural context, and collaborate with other transcribers. After the 2016 study, other researchers set the human parity rate at a 5.1 percent error rate. Therefore, even using the more conservative standard, the system has achieved human parity.
https://futurism.com/microsofts-speech-recognition-is-now-as-good-as-a-human-transcriber/
Share on FacebookSelf-made billionaire Bill Gates: Better technology must be developed to help educate people
by Zameena Mejia, CNBC
Gates says he sees today’s “gold standard” of physically attending a university just to prove you have learned new information and abilities as antiquated and ripe for change. “I see those things decoupling,” Gates says, adding “the way you prove that you have certain skills can be very straightforward.” One digitally-savvy way to do so is by participating in massive open online courses. In the future, Gates says many of the people responsible for deep innovations “will be polymathic, they will be unusually strange people who learn a lot of things and, therefore, able to reason across the boundaries of two subject areas.” “Fortunately, a very small percentage of society can do the innovations that benefit society very broadly,” he says.