November 12, 2024 — Chronicle Intelligence, a division of The Chronicle of Higher Education, recently published a comprehensive report on AI in Education, featuring Ashok Goel and AI-ALOE – AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education.  Colleges are grappling with the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in education as AI tools become more prevalent on campuses. Administrators see AI as a powerful tool to improve efficiency and enhance teaching, while skeptics raise concerns about its potential to dehumanize education and affect students’ development in writing and research.

October 1, 2024 – The article explores the transformative impact of Jill Watson, an AI teaching assistant introduced at Georgia Tech, designed to support students in a large online course by answering routine queries.

Student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with many considering nominating Jill for an Outstanding TA award due to her quick and relatable responses. Moreover, her implementation demonstrated how AI can complement human educators by taking on repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on deeper educational interactions. This collaboration highlights the potential of AI in education, suggesting that it empowers rather than replaces human instructors.

October 12, 2024 – Listverse published 10 Times AI Replaced Humans (and No One Noticed) and Jill Watson is number 5!

The article recaps DILab’s Professor Ashok Goel introducing Jill Watson in his online artificial intelligence course. Jill efficiently responded to student questions, graded assignments, and participated in discussions. It wasn’t revealed until the end of the semester that Jill was an AI created with IBM Watson technology. Her successful integration into the classroom highlighted the potential for AI to assist in education and raised important questions about the role of AI in enhancing personalized learning experiences.

September 24, 2024 – Jill Watson and DILab director, Ashok Goel, were featured in the Fast Company Article “These schools don’t fear artificial intelligence. They put it to work”. The article discusses advancements in AI tutoring systems, particularly at Arizona State University, Harvard University, and Georgia Institute of Technology.

In addition, the article highlights a project called SAMI, which uses AI to foster community by pairing students based on shared interests, thereby improving their sense of belonging—important for emotional and cognitive well-being.

September, 13, 2024, DILab’s Qiaosi (Chelsea) Wang passed her PhD Defense of Dissertation! Chelsea presented her thesis on Mutual Theory of Mind for Human-AI communication which she presented at the CHI conference earlier this year. We are incredibly proud of all the effort and dedication Dr. Wang has put into her thesis and are looking forward to the extraordinary work she will accomplish in the future.

Last week, a Design and Intelligence Lab member, Karan Taneja, presented their poster and paper, Does Jill Watson Increase Teaching Presence?, at the Learning at Scale 2024 conference.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article on Morehouse College’s artificial TA – “a professor’s digital mini-me”. Within the article, DILab’s Jill Watson is briefly compared to Morehouse’s AI TA, creating the question: do students learn better if there is a visual representation of the professor versus just a chatbot? Food for thought to be sure.

The Design Intelligence Lab is looking for a few OMSCS students to work with us as research assistants starting in Fall 2024. DILab conducts research at the intersection of AI, Cognitive Science, and Learning Technology. At present, much of our work focuses on AI for learning and education (https://aialoe.org/).

The ongoing research projects include conversational courseware (for example, Jill Watson for interactive books), interactive videos (Ivy), AI social actors (SAMI), and personalization of learning in systems thinking (VERA). The research projects also include self-explanation, machine teaching, and theory of mind. In addition, we are working on a large project called Architecture for Learning (A4L). 

We have a long history of working with OMSCS students and have several in our lab at present. We love working with OMSCS students because typically they are very smart, very skilled, very motivated and very professional. We would like to work with OMSCS students who can commit to at least 10 hours of work a week for at least a year: it takes that kind of effort to make a contribution. This means that the candidate should be in the OMSCS program through the end of Summer 2025 or beyond. 

The responsibilities typically involve development of AI research software. We would prefer students who have taken at least one course in software engineering and at least one in AI as part of their OMSCS work.

The work can be done remotely. Unfortunately, there is no pay for these positions. However, you may register for credit or even do a three-semester long research project with me.

If you are interested, please contact my executive assistant Moriah Ugi (mugi3@gatech.edu) with a CV.

Some Design and Intelligence Lab members have recently enjoyed success at having papers accepted to workshops associated with EDM (Educational Data Mining) 2024 and L@S (Learning@Scale) 2024, both chaired by DILab’s David Joyner and hosted by Georgia Tech’s Global Learning Center.

The Design Intelligence Lab’s Ashok Goel was featured in Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing’s June Newsletter: ‘Friends’ Inspires AI Tool.

While discussing the advantages of AI personalization in education with EducationWeek, Goel makes the point that AI feedback “might be right for, say, a neurotypical child and maybe not right for a neuroatypical child”.