One of the great challenges in learning new skills is being able to put them to practice in real scenarios. Although practicing in real scenarios offers critical learning, it also comes with serious risks. Can AI be the answer in creating on the job learning without the risks? My guest is an internationally recognized expert in AI in education and the technology he created helps people learn faster and more effectively. Dr Lewis Johnson co-founded Alelo in 2005 as a spinout of the University of Southern California, under his leadership Alelo has developed into a major producer of AI-driven learning products focusing on communication skills.

In an age of COVID-19, the phrase "business as usual" has nearly lost all meaning for Canadians who have seen their lives disrupted in myriad ways. That includes researchers Jean-Philippe Julien and Costin Antonescu as they work to find antiviral drugs that can fight the disease that is paralyzing countries around the world. "Speed is the key," says Julien, an associate professor in U of T's departments of biochemistry and immunology and a senior scientist in molecular medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children who focuses his work on developing a vaccine for HIV and malaria. "That's what is making research into COVID-19 different. We normally take a linear approach, going step by step, selecting a few candidate drugs or therapies and slowly moving them forward with testing over several years. "But now, with COVID, we all understand that this approach is not possible.

The irony is not lost on Kate Saenko. Now that humans have programmed computers to learn, they want to know exactly what the computers have learned, and how they make decisions after their learning process is complete. To do that, Saenko, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of computer science, used humans--asking them to look at dozens of pictures depicting steps that the computer may have taken on its road to a decision, and identify its most likely path. The humans gave Saenko answers that made sense, but there was a problem: they made sense to humans, and humans, Saenko knew, have biases. In fact, humans don't even understand how they themselves make decisions.

For the first time ever, researchers have captured footage of wild chimpanzee mothers teaching their offspring to use tools. The videos taken at the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo shed new light on the evolution of teaching, showing how young chimpanzees learn from their mothers to catch termites with'fishing probes.' Mother chimpanzees were found to bring multiple tools or divide their own in half, allowing them to address the needs of their young without hindering their own ability to gather food. The videos taken at the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo shed new light on the evolution of teaching, showing how young chimpanzees learn from their mothers to catch termites with'fishing probes' The videos show how young chimpanzees learn from their mothers to catch termites with'fishing probes.' The footage also revealed that the mothers used different strategies to provide their young with tools.