What robots want: Using machine-learning to teach effectively

AI is having a moment. One need only casually scan the news each week to see that the topics of artificial intelligence and machine learning have grown like ivy, extending their tendrils into stories as varied as racial bias, hiring, and of course, identifying spiders. But for all the diverse applications of AI across our inboxes, magazines and evening news, few outside of the engineering community have a robust understanding of what the terms actually mean, or how the robots and algorithms we increasingly rely upon come to know how to do the complex jobs humans assign to them. For starters, the machines involved in machine learning are increasingly more likely to take the form of a disembodied hivemind than a humanoid assistant. Nearly 60 years after Rosie the robotic maid first enchanted American prime time television viewers on The Jetsons, robotic minds and algorithms instead are in demand within nearly every sector of business. Filling these machine minds with context and experience requires teaching and training.