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.
