Education
Governing artificial intelligence at scale - Policy Forum
We need to discuss the systems in which it will be a critical component, Genevieve Bell, Katherine Daniell, and Amy McLennan write. Defining artificial intelligence (AI) is messy. Ask 10 experts to define AI and you will get 10 different answers. It is easy to think that the most important policy question, then, is a definitional one that tidies up the mess: what is AI? But AI is not a singular thing.
Flawed Algorithms Are Grading Millions of Students' Essays
Every year, millions of students sit down for standardized tests that carry weighty consequences. National tests like the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) serve as gatekeepers to higher education, while state assessments can determine everything from whether a student will graduate to federal funding for schools and teacher pay. Traditional paper-and-pencil tests have given way to computerized versions. And increasingly, the grading process--even for written essays--has also been turned over to algorithms. Natural language processing (NLP) artificial intelligence systems--often called automated essay scoring engines--are now either the primary or secondary grader on standardized tests in at least 21 states, according to a survey conducted by Motherboard.
'AI in UK schools? I'd give us 5 out of 10'
On a visit to China this summer, I was asked by a local journalist if I thought their country's education and training system was ready for artificial intelligence (AI) and the fourth industrial revolution (4IR). This got me thinking about what it means for any country – let's say the UK – to be AI-ready in educational terms. In this country, there is increasing discussion and debate around the use of technology, including AI, in teaching and learning. Most teachers know the technology exists, but perhaps not necessarily how it can help them in their everyday work. Need to know: What is the fourth industrial revolution?
Humans Don't Realize How Biased They Are Until AI Reproduces the Same Bias, Says UNESCO AI Chair
While machine learning today is dominated by deep neural network research, in the 1990s neural approaches were not recognized as reliable for real-world applications. Back then, researchers put their efforts into kernel methods and support vector machines (SVM). One of the most notable and respected contributors to kernel methods and SVM is John Shawe-Taylor, a professor at University College London (UK) and Director of the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML). His main research area is Statistical Learning Theory, but his contributions range from neural networks to machine learning and graph theory. Shawe-Taylor has published over 300 papers with over 42000 citations.
Two studies reveal benefits of mindfulness for middle school students
Two new studies from MIT suggest that mindfulness -- the practice of focusing one's awareness on the present moment -- can enhance academic performance and mental health in middle schoolers. The researchers found that more mindfulness correlates with better academic performance, fewer suspensions from school, and less stress. "By definition, mindfulness is the ability to focus attention on the present moment, as opposed to being distracted by external things or internal thoughts. If you're focused on the teacher in front of you, or the homework in front of you, that should be good for learning," says John Gabrieli, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research. The researchers also showed, for the first time, that mindfulness training can alter brain activity in students.
Training Optimus Prime, M.D.: Generating Medical Certification Items by Fine-Tuning OpenAI's gpt2 Transformer Model
Training Optimus Prime, M.D.: Generating Medical Certification Items by Fine-Tuning OpenAI's gpt2 Transformer Model Matthias von Davier August 21st, 2019 Abstract Objective: Showcasing Artificial Intelligence, in particular deep neural networks, for language modeling aimed at automated generation of medical education test items. Materials and Methods: OpenAI's gpt2 transformer language model was retrained using PubMed's open access text mining database. The retraining was done using toolkits based on tensorflow-gpu available on GitHub, using a workstation equipped with two GPUs. Results: In comparison to a study that used character based recurrent neural networks trained on open access items, the retrained transformer architecture allows generating higher quality text that can be used as draft input for medical education assessment material. In addition, prompted text generation can be used for production of distractors suitable for multiple choice items used in certification exams. Discussion: The current state of neural network based language models can be used to develop tools in supprt of authoring medical education exams using retrained models on the basis of corpora consisting of general medical text collections. Conclusion: Future experiments with more recent transformer models (such as Grover, TransformerXL) using existing medical certification exam item pools is expected to further improve results and facilitate the development of assessment materials. Objective The aim of this article is to provide evidence on the current state of automated item generation (AIG) using deep neural networks (DNNs). Based on earlier work, a first paper that tackled this issue used character-based Address for correspondence: mvondavier@nbme.org: Time flies in the domain of DNNs used for language modeling, indeed: The day this paper was submitted, on August 13th, 2019, to internal review, NVIDIA published yet another, larger language model of the transformer used in this paper. The MegratronLM (apart from taking a bite out of the pun in this article's title) is currently the largest language model based on the transformer architecture [3]. This latest neural network language model has 8 billions of parameters, which is incomprehensible compared to the type of neural networks we used only two decades ago. At that time, in winter semester 1999-2000, I taught classes about artificial Neural Networks (NNs, e.g. Back then, Artificial Intelligence (AI) already entered what was referred to as AI winter, as most network sizes were limited to rather small architectures unless supercomputers were employed.
Automated Machine Learning: how do teams work together on an AutoML project?
Each iteration runs within an experiment and stores serialized pipelines from the automated machine learning iterations until they retrieve the pipeline with the best performance on the validation data set. Once the evaluation has been performed, the data scientist, project manager, and business lead meet again to review the forecasting results. It's the project manager and business lead's job to make sense of the outputs and choose practical steps based on those results. The business lead needs to confirm that the best model and pipeline meet the business objective and that the machine learning solution answers the questions with acceptable accuracy to deploy the system to production for use by their internal sales forecasting application. Automated machine learning is based on a breakthrough from the Microsoft Research division. The approach combines ideas from collaborative filtering and Bayesian optimization to search an enormous space of possible machine learning pipelines intelligently and efficiently.
Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Looking to network with fellow data scientists and application developers while exploring machine learning, containers, and cloud computing with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SAP? Join us at AWS DevDay to get hands-on experience learning how different technologies from AWS and SAP integrate and work together to create a custom machine learning solution. Join this full-day workshop to get access to tools, learning materials, network with experts from AWS, SAP, and WomeninBigData.org. This event is ideal for data engineers, data scientists, and application developers from all experience levels who want to dive deeper into highly technical hands on training and content around machine learning, AWS, and SAP.
How LinkedIn, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and Netflix are Solving Data Management and Discovery for Machine Learning Solutions
When comes to machine learning, data is certainly the new oil. The processes for managing the lifecycle of datasets are some of the most challenging elements of large scale machine learning solutions. Data ingestion, indexing, search, annotation, discovery are some of the aspects required to maintain high quality datasets. The complexity of these challenges increase linearly with the size and number of the target datasets. While it is relatively easy to manage training datasets for a single machine learning model, scaling that process across thousands of dataset and hundreds of models can become nothing short of a nightmare. Some of the companies at the forefront of machine learning innovation such as LinkedIn, Uber, Netflix, Airbnb or Lyft have certainly experienced the magnitude of this challenge and they have built specific solutions to address it.