Education
How AI and ML are helping tackle the global teacher shortage Amazon Web Services
United Arab Emirates-based global EdTech Alef Education is on a mission to digitally transform the education sector to support its most valuable resource: teachers. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics estimates that the world needs almost 69 million new teachers by 2030 to meet the deadline of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal for quality education. But according to latest projections, the world will fail its education commitments without addressing the teacher shortage. Overwhelming teacher workload is a major contributor to teacher scarcity and the urgency to tackle this imbalance is a key driver for United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based global education technology Alef Education. The forward-thinking organization is shrinking teacher workloads and helping them better manage classrooms through its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Value Driven Representation for Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learning
Keramati, Ramtin, Brunskill, Emma
Interactive adaptive systems powered by Reinforcement Learning (RL) have many potential applications, such as intelligent tutoring systems. In such systems there is typically an external human system designer that is creating, monitoring and modifying the interactive adaptive system, trying to improve its performance on the target outcomes. In this paper we focus on algorithmic foundation of how to help the system designer choose the set of sensors or features to define the observation space used by reinforcement learning agent. We present an algorithm, value driven representation (VDR), that can iteratively and adaptively augment the observation space of a reinforcement learning agent so that is sufficient to capture a (near) optimal policy. To do so we introduce a new method to optimistically estimate the value of a policy using offline simulated Monte Carlo rollouts. We evaluate the performance of our approach on standard RL benchmarks with simulated humans and demonstrate significant improvement over prior baselines.
R3: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Reasoning Processes
Wang, Ran, Tao, Kun, Song, Dingjie, Zhang, Zhilong, Ma, Xiao, Su, Xi'ao, Dai, Xinyu
Existing question answering systems can only predict answers without explicit reasoning processes, which hinder their explainability and make us overestimate their ability of understanding and reasoning over natural language. In this work, we propose a novel task of reading comprehension, in which a model is required to provide final answers and reasoning processes. To this end, we introduce a formalism for reasoning over unstructured text, namely Text Reasoning Meaning Representation (TRMR). TRMR consists of three phrases, which is expressive enough to characterize the reasoning process to answer reading comprehension questions. We develop an annotation platform to facilitate TRMR's annotation, and release the R3 dataset, a \textbf{R}eading comprehension benchmark \textbf{R}equiring \textbf{R}easoning processes. R3 contains over 60K pairs of question-answer pairs and their TRMRs. Our dataset is available at: \url{http://anonymous}.
PaStaNet: Toward Human Activity Knowledge Engine
Li, Yong-Lu, Xu, Liang, Liu, Xinpeng, Huang, Xijie, Xu, Yue, Wang, Shiyi, Fang, Hao-Shu, Ma, Ze, Chen, Mingyang, Lu, Cewu
Existing image-based activity understanding methods mainly adopt direct mapping, i.e. from image to activity concepts, which may encounter performance bottleneck since the huge gap. In light of this, we propose a new path: infer human part states first and then reason out the activities based on part-level semantics. Human Body Part States (PaSta) are fine-grained action semantic tokens, e.g.
Combating The Machine Ethics Crisis: An Educational Approach
In recent years, the availability of massive data sets and improved computing power have driven the advent of cutting-edge machine learning algorithms. However, this trend has triggered growing concerns associated with its ethical issues. In response to such a phenomenon, this study proposes a feasible solution that combines ethics and computer science materials in artificial intelligent classrooms. In addition, the paper presents several arguments and evidence in favor of the necessity and effectiveness of this integrated approach.
Machine Learning with Python Coursera
This course dives into the basics of machine learning using an approachable, and well-known programming language, Python. In this course, we will be reviewing two main components: First, you will be learning about the purpose of Machine Learning and where it applies to the real world. Second, you will get a general overview of Machine Learning topics such as supervised vs unsupervised learning, model evaluation, and Machine Learning algorithms. In this course, you practice with real-life examples of Machine learning and see how it affects society in ways you may not have guessed! By just putting in a few hours a week for the next few weeks, this is what you'll get. 1) New skills to add to your resume, such as regression, classification, clustering, sci-kit learn and SciPy 2) New projects that you can add to your portfolio, including cancer detection, predicting economic trends, predicting customer churn, recommendation engines, and many more.
Unity-ML Agents: The Mayan Adventure
In the last two articles, you learned to use ML-Agents and trained two agents. The first was able to jump over walls, and the second learned to destroy a pyramid to get the golden brick. It's time to do something harder. When I was thinking about creating a custom environment, I remembered the famous scene in Indiana Jones, where Indy needs to get the golden statue and avoid a lot of traps to survive. I was thinking: could my agent could be as good as him?
PyTorch for Deep Learning and Computer Vision
PyTorch has rapidly become one of the most transformative frameworks in the field of Deep Learning. Since its release, PyTorch has completely changed the landscape in the field of deep learning due to its flexibility, and how easy it is to use when building Deep Learning models. Deep Learning jobs command some of the highest salaries in the development world. This course is meant to take you from the complete basics, to building state-of-the art Deep Learning and Computer Vision applications with PyTorch. With over 44000 students, Rayan is a highly rated and experienced instructor who has followed a "learn by doing" style to create this amazing course.
Robots in the Danger Zone: Exploring Public Perception through Engagement
Robb, David A., Ahmad, Muneeb I., Tiseo, Carlo, Aracri, Simona, McConnell, Alistair C., Page, Vincent, Dondrup, Christian, Garcia, Francisco J. Chiyah, Nguyen, Hai-Nguyen, Pairet, Èric, Ramírez, Paola Ardón, Semwal, Tushar, Taylor, Hazel M., Wilson, Lindsay J., Lane, David, Hastie, Helen, Lohan, Katrin
Public perceptions of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (RAI) are important in the acceptance, uptake, government regulation and research funding of this technology. Recent research has shown that the public's understanding of RAI can be negative or inaccurate. We believe effective public engagement can help ensure that public opinion is better informed. In this paper, we describe our first iteration of a high throughput in-person public engagement activity. We describe the use of a light touch quiz-format survey instrument to integrate in-the-wild research participation into the engagement, allowing us to probe both the effectiveness of our engagement strategy, and public perceptions of the future roles of robots and humans working in dangerous settings, such as in the off-shore energy sector. We critique our methods and share interesting results into generational differences within the public's view of the future of Robotics and AI in hazardous environments. These findings include that older peoples' views about the future of robots in hazardous environments were not swayed by exposure to our exhibit, while the views of younger people were affected by our exhibit, leading us to consider carefully in future how to more effectively engage with and inform older people.