Throw out the chalk and blackboards, because there's a new player in the world of education. While ink and copybooks were the foundation stones for a new era of learning centuries ago, in 2021 we stand on the precipice of another massive change in educational technology: artificial intelligence. Today's Daily Dose takes you through the exciting new ways technology is set to mold education in the years to come. We look at how it can ease stress, save time and put a 21st-century touch on some age-old teaching methods. So hang up your backpack and put away your pencil and scissors.

In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective solution to build practical teacher recommender systems for online one-on-one classes. Our system consists of (1) a pseudo matching score module that provides reliable training labels; (2) a ranking model that scores every candidate teacher; (3) a novelty boosting module that gives additional opportunities to new teachers; and (4) a diversity metric that guardrails the recommended results to reduce the chance of collision. Offline experimental results show that our approach outperforms a wide range of baselines. Furthermore, we show that our approach is able to reduce the number of student-teacher matching attempts from 7.22 to 3.09 in a five-month observation on a third-party online education platform.

The algorithms meant to make life easy could further divide us if we're not paying attention The current moment is asking us to evaluate almost every systemic issue in our society. While it might be uncomfortable, the only way through it is to look at the systems that control who wins and who loses and ask, "are they biased?" It's convenient to think that our work in technology is above these issues. A lot of folks in tech do this work to change the world or help communities in need. But just like the rest of society, we need to take this moment of self-reflection seriously, lest our failures are judged by the next generation as harshly as we're judging our elders now.