Professor Ashok Goel of Georgia Tech developed an artificially intelligent teaching assistant to help handle the numerous questions from students in the online class. Professor Goel already had 8 teaching assistants, but that wasn't enough to deal with the huge number of questions from students.
Many students drop out of online courses for lack of teaching support. 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 change this situation by creating 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 (论坛) . At first, the virtual assistant wasn't too great. But Goel and his team sourced the online discussion forum to find all 40, 000 questions that had ever been asked since the class started. Then they began to feed Jill with the questions and answers. After some adjustment, 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 artificial intelligence 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 questions raised by students. The name, Jill Watson will of course, change to something else next term. Professor Goel has a much rosier outlook on the future of Al than say, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak.
