Children take part in an extracurricular club about coding and AI in Cambridge. Children take part in an extracurricular club about coding and AI in Cambridge. Generation AI: fears of'social divide' unless all children learn computing skills In a Cambridge classroom, Joseph, 10, trained his AI model to discern between drawings of apples and drawings of smiles. "AI gets lots of things wrong," he said, as it mistakenly identified a fruit as a face. He set about retraining it and, in a flash, he had it back on track - instinctively understanding the inner nature of artificial intelligence and machine learning in a way few adults do.

The Final Exam, a recently released video game in which you play as a student caught amid a school shooting, lasts for around ten minutes, about the length of a real shooting event in a U.S. school. The game opens in an empty locker room. You hear distant gunfire, screams, harried footsteps, and the thudding of heavy furniture being overturned. The sense of disharmony is immediate: a familiar scene of youth and learning is grimly debased into one of peril. As the lockers surround you, their doors gaping, you feel caged: get me out of here. Moments later, as you enter the gymnasium, a two-minute countdown flashes on screen.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used to generate texts in response to different writing tasks: reports, essays, story telling. However, language models do not have a meta-representation of the text writing process, nor inherent communication learning needs, comparable to those of young human students. This paper introduces a fine-grained linguistic and textual analysis of multilingual Small Language Models' (SLMs) writing. With our method, Chain-of-MetaWriting, SLMs can imitate some steps of the human writing process, such as planning and evaluation. We mainly focused on short story and essay writing tasks in French for schoolchildren and undergraduate students respectively. Our results show that SLMs encounter difficulties in assisting young students on sensitive topics such as violence in the schoolyard, and they sometimes use words too complex for the target audience. In particular, the output is quite different from the human produced texts in term of text cohesion and coherence regarding temporal connectors, topic progression, reference.

A whistleblower who exposed illegal working conditions in a factory making Amazon's Alexa devices says he was tortured before being jailed by Chinese authorities. Tang Mingfang, 43, was jailed after he revealed how the Foxconn factory in the southern Chinese city of Hengyang used schoolchildren working illegally long hours to manufacture Amazon's popular Echo, Echo Dot and Kindle devices. Now, after spending two years in prison, he is appealing to the higher courts to clear his name. He has taken the difficult decision to talk publicly, despite being aware of the risks of reprisals, because he believes Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, have a responsibility to support his appeal and that the Observer also has a responsibility to highlight his case. Tang, who is married with a nine-year-old son, said his father – who died while he was in prison – would have wanted him to speak up when he saw young workers being abused.

Now that many kids are about to go back to school, Google thinks it can offer a helping hand -- including after class. It's introducing Assistant and search features to help parents coordinate in morning and kids to learn more (or at least, stay entertained). To start, Family Bell is coming to mobile devices. Accordingly, it can soon start a checklist on a Nest Hub to remind kids to make the bed and brush their teeth before they fly out the door. Kids will also have more ways to improve their education at home.

Amazon is being urged to rename its personal assistant because girls also named Alexa are being relentlessly bullied by other schoolchildren, their parents say. The Alexa assistant -- which was launched in 2014, but only had its UK debut in 2016 -- can increasingly be found in homes via Amazon's Echo and Echo Dot devices. Not only is the AI-powered system named Alexa, it is also the default'wake word' used to alert Amazon devices that an instruction or question will follow. However, this has led to individuals named Alexa becoming the butt of recurring jokes in which their name is shouted, followed by a command. The assistant's granting of a name shared by real people has resulted in movements such as'Alexa is a Human' -- which is lobbying Amazon to reconsider the choice.

Given the outsized hold Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has acquired on public imagination of late, it comes as no surprise that many are wondering what AI can do for the public health crisis wrought by the COVID-19 coronavirus. A casual search of AI and COVID-19 already returns a plethora of news stories, many of them speculative. While AI technology is not ready to help with the magical discovery of a new vaccine, there are important ways it can assist in this fight. Controlling epidemics is, in large part, based on laborious contact tracing and using that information to predict the spread. We live in a time in which we constantly leave digital footprints through our daily life and interactions.

Hundreds of schoolchildren have been drafted in to make Amazon's Alexa devices in China as part of a controversial and often illegal attempt to meet production targets, documents seen by the Guardian reveal. Interviews with workers and leaked documents from Amazon's supplier Foxconn show that many of the children have been required to work nights and overtime to produce the smart-speaker devices, in breach of Chinese labour laws. According to the documents, the teenagers – drafted in from schools and technical colleges in and around the central southern city of Hengyang – are classified as "interns", and their teachers are paid by the factory to accompany them. Teachers are asked to encourage uncooperative pupils to accept overtime work on top of regular shifts. Some of the pupils making Amazon's Alexa-enabled Echo and Echo Dot devices along with Kindles have been required to work for more than two months to supplement staffing levels at the factory during peak production periods, researchers found.

The Walklake robot assists a schoolchild's morning health scan. More than 2,000 preschools in China are using a robot to check the health status of their students. Before children enter the classrooms each day, they stand in front of the robot--called Walklake--for a quick checkup by showing it their eyes, throats, and hands. Walklake is equipped with an infrared thermometer on its forehead, as well as cameras on its eyes, mouth, and chest. The system is designed to scan for disease symptoms, such as fever, hand blisters, throat sores, and red eyes.

Please stand in front of Walklake for your examination. This health checking robot takes just 3 seconds to diagnose a variety of ailments in children, including conjunctivitis, and hand, foot and mouth disease. Over 2000 preschools in China, with children aged between 2 and 6, are using Walklake every morning to check the health status of their students. Walklake has a boxy body and smiling cartoony face.