Uncategorized

By Joshua Preston | Sep. 15, 2019 |

Georgia Tech seeded a national change in higher education in bringing its Master of Science in Computer Science degree program to the web at a fraction of the cost as the same on-campus degree.

The online program also introduced an artificially intelligent teaching assistant (virtual TA) that is now used in several courses.

The AI agent Jill Watson – introduced in 2016 to answer common course questions – is marking its fourth year with several milestones that have the potential to lead to transformative global changes in education.

Researchers started with computing courses in introducing the virtual TA, which can correctly answer course questions from students whenever they need help. Now, the first science course – Introduction to Biology – is using Jill Watson to answer student questions.

“This is a significant test for our AI system,” said Varsha Achar, MSCS alumna and a member of the Jill Watson team. “Jill has interacted with multiple thousands of students in online computing courses and is now tackling a very different subject that will show how the system can be used much more broadly.”

Not only is Jill answering questions related to science material, but the agent’s first day in a residential classroom was this semester (biology and CS courses on the Georgia Tech campus). It’s also being deployed in a record five courses as a TA. Two was the previous record for a single semester.

The research team is confident Jill is ready. Members of the Design & Intelligence Lab, directed by School of Interactive Computing Professor Ashok Goel, have spent countless hours tweaking Jill’s code and the best approach to scale the TA to any college course.

“The success of Jill Watson lies in answering questions in an almost human-like manner and how it has come to do so,” said Goel.

Jill’s very first online students three years ago didn’t know an AI was answering a portion of their questions, and many were surprised when they were told at the end of the online course. Building a believable agent – years in the making – has required many different approaches and data for training the system.

The growing course load for the virtual TA is possible, in part, through a document that students get on the very first day of class – the course syllabus.

Achar, the chief architect of the knowledge bases Jill uses to answer questions, has created these sources based on data in the syllabi. This includes structured data (e.g. deadlines, test dates, submission processes) and unstructured data (e.g. disability services, policies on late assignments).

It’s a method that is proving key to Jill’s growth.

“We don’t include anything for Jill to answer that’s not in the syllabus, except information on relevant institute policies,” said Achar. “That’s important to keeping the integrity of the system. I could easily google extra information that might be needed, but we’re not the experts on the classes.”

A New Vision for AIs in the Classroom

In a year of firsts for Jill, the most critical is a new approach to building the agent, one that might prove to accelerate the AI race in higher education.

The biology course is using not one, but two Jills – the first answers common questions and another version of Jill partners with a powerful AI agent that is an expert in ecology.

This second AI agent, VERA , or virtual ecological research assistant, was developed by members of the same lab and is used to introduce students to experimentation with ecosystems and food chains.

To get undergrads quickly up-to-speed on how to use VERA’s modeling and simulation capabilities, students are able ask Jill questions on how to use VERA. If students get stuck in the scientific discovery process, they can ask Jill how to, for example, put a predator into the VERA system and change population size, rather than thumbing through a technical manual.

This new version of Jill was created using the VERA tutorial, which students may never need to crack now. It proves that the TA system can adapt from a syllabus to a tutorial, something that opens up the possibilities for creating even more complex agents, said Achar.

Right now, it takes Achar and the team a little over 24 hours (including deployment time) to build Jill for a course. They have their sights set on bringing that down to less than a business day and, in time, allowing instructors to build their own versions of Jill.

And using Jill and VERA together hints at the ambitious goals the research team has in leveraging the power of multiple AIs to be able to adapt any course material.

“It’s extremely exciting to be a part of this team,” Achar says. “This is an opportunity to create groundbreaking technology and do things in education that haven’t been done before.”

“We’re able to shape minds and inspire people in countless ways. This work could inspire others to build future AI systems or learn in unprecedented ways. It’s something that I see helping deliver on the promise of lifetime learning.

By Joshua Preston | Sept. 23, 2019 |

On the internet, students are able to take courses on the couch (or anywhere) and set their own pace for learning. These and other factors have contributed to an explosion in web enrollments.

But online convenience can come at a cost to building social connections. The lack of human interaction and support can be a direct cause for high dropout rates in web courses.

To directly address social barriers in virtual classes, an artificially intelligent system from Georgia Tech has been designed to connect online students quickly to their peers. It is being deployed in the institute’s Online Master of Science in Computer Science program (OMSCS) as well as two campus classes fall semester 2019.

Using the Jill Watson AI framework, the social agent is intended ultimately to help support students from different walks of life adapt more quickly to rigorous course requirements and foster a community where students can build their own support structures.

“In previous semesters, we had what we called an introduction agent that responded to student introductions and greeted students. Now we have a more fully realized social AI agent that can help students connect virtually and in real life,” said Ida Camacho, the lead engineer for the redesigned AI.

Encouraging social interactions among students using the Jill social agent demanded Camacho rethink the AI’s construct. Questions of privacy came up early on, and researchers found out from testing that if the social agent was too personal, students might get distracting playing with it.

Using student introductions in the online forum, researchers prompted students to share personal details in order to help build a model for the agent. Using this unstructured data presented its own challenges, such as when the system encountered certain words, such as Paris, and had to parse out whether it was a location or it was referring to a certain blonde celebrity.

One of Camacho’s insightful designs centered on creating summaries of student information that is viewable by those enrolled.

When students enter the forum and introduce themselves now, the Jill social agent can immediately share top results by percent of classmates based on location, timezone, other courses being taken, and primary interests.

“We wanted students to feel like they are part of the community without giving up their anonymity,” said Camacho. “Increasing student engagement and creating micro-communities are two of our primary goals.”

Students can also choose to join conversations based on any area of interest (location, hobbies, etc.) using the hashtag #ConnectMe, which allows them to see and click on individual student names for those who opt in.

Based on the responses, students have already taken to the new and improved Jill.

“One thing that surprised me was that students started trying to connect IRL, or in real life,” said Camacho. “They wanted to set up study groups and meet each other. This was happening all over the place, like New York City, Austin, and Tokyo.”

Camacho suspected there might be a hunger for more social interactions in online courses, and she is fully committed to delivering the best student experience on this front.

“I envision the social agent being used more than just at the start of classes,” she said. “It’s already creating some social glue, getting students to talk right away so they don’t feel like they’re in this all alone.

“Jill can keep the conversation going, and I’m planning for the AI at the end of the semester to share recommendations by students on courses they’ve taken.”

Camacho in one sense is the ideal person to head the Design & Intelligence Lab’s new Jill social agent initiative. The Fresno, Calif., resident is a recent alumna of the OMSCS program and knows how important it was to stay engaged with her peers.

“I feel like if I hadn’t met anyone I might not have been as successful. My community-building started when others invited me into their study groups and I became a TA.”

She jokes that when she was a student, she enrolled in the program’s Knowledge-Based AI course – where the Jill Watson virtual TA was deployed using a pseudonym – to see if she could pick out the AI amongst the human TAs helping students in the online forums.

“I guessed wrong,” she said laughing. “I ended up thinking that it was the head TA. He was online all the time answering student questions. How can someone be online that much?”

Jill Watson being indistinguishable from its human counterparts might be taken as a good sign by the lab’s researchers as they continue to build the future of AI and help students from around the world succeed in pursuing online learning.

By Joshua Preston | Oct. 1, 2019 |

Georgia Tech’s newest AI in the classroom, VERA, is debuting as part of the institute’s Introduction to Biology course this fall semester, signaling a significant advancement for artificial intelligence in science education.

VERA, or Virtual Ecological Research Assistant, is designed to enable users to construct conceptual models of ecological systems and run interactive simulations of these models through a web browser. The AI agent provides a virtual lab that allows users to explore ecological systems and perform “what if” experiments to either explain an existing ecological system or attempt to predict the outcome of future changes to one.

“Students don’t need extensive scientific knowledge or programming and math skills to use VERA,” said Sungeun An, human-centered computing Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech and lead developer of the AI system. “They can build a conceptual model with simple visual cues on the computer screen, such as dragging elements or selecting input options.”

Students can get started on virtual science experiments quickly with VERA, but learning the system – even one with a fairly intuitive web interface and designed to foster a curiosity for scientific discovery – may still require some help, said An.

To this end, the Design & Intelligence Lab – Georgia Tech’s leading space for AI education research – is using the Jill Watson AI framework to create a virtual teaching assistant that can answer student questions about how to use VERA.

“Leveraging the Jill Watson virtual TA and VERA research assistant together is a powerful demonstration of how to scale technology to serve more populations and provide access to the world’s scientific knowledge,” said Ashok Goel, professor of Interactive Computing and director of the DILab.

Combining the strength of the two AI agents is part of an intentional approach to rethinking instructional design for online learning. VERA is meant to be used anywhere by anyone interested in science exploration, so making it as accessible as possible is key to the system’s adoption, according to researchers. The biology course VERA is being used in is an on-campus class.

Researchers have also made the system open access on the web. Anyone with an internet connection can go to Ask Jill (the virtual TA) on Slack for help on using VERA and get a quick understanding of how the AI operates. In a new video series, viewers get a short demo of VERA in a scenario on dealing with rampant kudzu growth in the Southeastern United States. Emily Weigel, one of the instructors for the biology course using VERA, co-hosts the series.

One of VERA’s defining features is the ecology database it uses. The AI Agent is powered by the Encyclopedia of Life, a free, open, multilingual, digital repository of curated information on nearly 2 million species and maintained by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. VERA has a presence right on the EOL’s homepage.

“People using VERA have access to the EOL and can test a hypothesis using countless organisms, make as many changes to variables as they want, and study the effects on any ecosystem through real-time modeling,” said An. “This is a unique opportunity that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

The research team has plans to eventually make VERA a central component for a collaborative space for scientific discovery. The space will be focused on sparking science discussions and promoting users’ ecology models and experimental approaches.

Learn more about VERA.

Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo.

“Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?”