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Medha Gupta sometimes felt worried about making the 20-minute walk from the corner where the school bus dropped her off to her home in Herndon,Va.—especially during the colder months in winter.
Her mother,Divya Gupta had a suggestion:write an app.She was half-kidding,but Medha didn't take the challenge lightly.So she set out to work.
The result was Safe Travel,an app designed by Medha to help walkers feel more secure when they are travelling alone.Using the iPhone,a person can program it to send a warning to someone he or she trusts if he or she fails to arrive at a destination within a certain time.
It was the first iOS app that Medha had created.While she didn't think much would come from the project,her effort caught the eye of judges for the annual Congressional App Challenge,who selected her as the winner for Virginia's 10th District.
The App Challenge is designed to encourage students to consider careers in science,technology,engineering,and math by experimenting with coding and computer science.Winning students are invited to attend a reception on Capitol Hill in April and also received $250 in Amazon Web Service credits.
Medha said it took her about 40 hours to design,program and test the app.As for her next app?Medha's not certain.She temporarily has her app-development ambitions on hold because she's busy teaching herself artificial intelligence to help deal with improper words on social media platforms.Yes,she knows that there are teams of engineers probably doing the same thing.But she figures it can't hurt her own part,too.
"If we see something wrong with the world,we should do something about it," she said."After all,the only one stopping us from doing something is ourselves."
A couple of years ago,Ashok Goel was overwhelmed by the number of questions his students were asking in his course on artificial intelligence.Goel teaches computer science at Georgia Tech,sometimes to large classes,where students can ask thousands of questions online in a discussion forum.Professor Goel already had eight teaching assistants,but that wasn't enough to deal with the increasing number of daily questions from students.
When students feel confused and reach out with questions that go unanswered,their motivation to continue begins to fade.Professor Goel decided to do something to improve this situation and his solution was to create a virtual assistant named Jill Watson,which is based on the IBM Watson platform.
Goel and his team developed several versions of Jill Watson before releasing her to the online forums.At first,the virtual assistant wasn't too great.But Goel and his team sourced the online discussion forum to find all the 40,000 questions that had ever been asked since the class was launched.Then they began to feed Jill with the questions and answers.After some adjustments and enough time,Jill was able to answer the students' questions correctly 97% of the time.The virtual assistant became so advanced and realistic that the students didn't know she was a computer.The students,who were studying artificial intelligence,were interacting with the virtual assistant and couldn't tell it apart from a real human being.Goel didn't inform them about Jill's true identity until April 26.The students were actually very positive about the experience.
The goal of Professor Goel's virtual assistant next year is to take over answering 40% of all the questions presented by students on the online forum.The name Jill Watson will,of course,change to something else next semester.Professor Goel has a rosy outlook on the future of artificial intelligence,believing it will be widely applied.
