Jill Watson is an AI virtual teaching assistant developed by Georgia Tech’s Design Intelligence Lab. It engages students in meaningful conversations on course materials such as textbooks, leveraging Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT for enhanced accuracy, reduced hallucinations, and increased resistance to toxic inputs. Rooted in the Community of Inquiry framework, Jill aims to (virtually) boost Teaching Presence, which in turn enhances Social and Cognitive Presence in educational settings. Jill can be deployed in multiple institutes as an LTI tool for one-on-one conversations in a classroom LMS (like Canvas or Blackboard) or on a discussion forum (such as EdStem). Research has demonstrated Jill’s ability to improve Teaching Presence, student grades, and student retention rates. Current efforts focus on scaling Jill for broader use, expanding multimodality, and adding features that further support student learning.
Machine Teaching for Question Answering in Jill Watson
Karan Taneja, Harsh Sikka, Vrinda Nandan, Ashok Goel. Design and Intelligence Lab @ School of Interactive Computing.
Jill Watson and AskJill: AI-Powered Q&A Agents
Dalton Bassett, Peter Carragher, Sona Jain, Vrinda Nandan, Sanjeev Rao, Saloni Shah, Harsh Sikka, Karan Taneja, Ashok Goel Design & Intelligence Laboratory, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology.
Jill Watson: Empowering Learners and Teachers with Virtual Teaching Assistant
Pratyusha Maiti, Sandeep Kakar, Karan Taneja, Sanjeev Rao, Pranav Guruprasad, Rob Lindgren, Gina Nguyen, Alekhya Nandula, Aiden Zhao, Ashok Goel. Design & Intelligence Laboratory, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology.
AskJill in SkillSync: Explanation and Trust in AI
SkillSync is an NSF-funded effort engaging an industry-academia consortium led by EduWorks and including Georgia Tech, the University System of Georgia, Credentials Engine, and several other partners. The goal is to build an AI application that enables companies to succinctly express reskilling needs for their workforce and helps colleges describe their educational offerings and respond to companies’ needs. The interactive tool better aligns job requirements and opportunities with reskilling knowledge, skills, and abilities, and distills these reskilling needs to universities in a way that matches specific learning outcomes.
When using SkillSync, both employers and educators can ask questions to a virtual coach named AskJill that is based on Georgia Tech’s virtual teaching assistant Jill Watson. AskJill helps explain SkillSync’s vocabulary, functions, and processing, thereby making it more transparent and trustworthy to its users. AskJill in SkillSync is a collaboration between the Design & Intelligence Laboratory and C21U.
Link: http://www.skillsync.com
Jill Watson Suite of Online Learning Tools
With the advent of Georgia Tech’s OMSCS (a massive online course to earn a Masters in CS), thousands of people around the world have been enrolling to learn. An increase in learners implied more questions being asked on class discussion forums. With a limited number of instructors per course, answering questions became increasingly difficult. This is when Jill Watson was conceived.
Jill Watson is a Virtual Teaching Assistant, that can answer questions about a course syllabus, when deployed on online communication forums like Piazza or Slack.
What initially began as a question answering agent for course syllabi, Jill Watson is gradually permeating into other domains. Jill Watson can now answer questions about VERA‘s instructional manual.
Watch this video to learn more about Jill Watson!
