Group items tagged

Great and thoughtful article...

"Sophie Bishton, a junior doctor, was "fed up with traditional learning and being talked at all the time" and so founded the Twitter finals revision group (known as twitfrg) in October 2012. Users are invited to participate in a scenario in real time. Prior to the event, revision notes related to the case are made available online. At a prearranged time, a tweet is sent marking the beginning of the scenario. "

""With the ability to learn from emerging patterns and discover new correlations, Watson's cognitive capabilities hold enormous potential in Africa - helping it to achieve in the next two decades what today's developed markets have achieved over two centuries," Kamal Bhattacharya, the director of IBM's Research - Africa, said in a news release."

"From a computer science perspective, learning the behaviour of a single user is tough. This is the small data problem; unlike big data, where patterns and trends easily emerge, individual human beings can be unpredictable and can change behaviour, which is not helpful for pattern-hunting algorithms."

"Machine learning is what's taking place with our personal data while we're passive players in the process. "

The need for schools to prepare for 21st century learning was top of the agenda at this year's BETT conference.They must embrace mobile technologies, games, podcasts and social networking, according to leading educationalist Professor Stephen Heppell.Schools should also break away from traditional classroom and curriculum models, he argued.The gap between those schools embracing technology and those not is getting bigger, he said.Prof Heppell was speaking to delegates at BETT, the world's biggest educational technology show.

Technology impacts on education From the abacus to the Apple Mac, technology has constantly changed the way we learn.In equal measure, the needs of education have provided the driving force behind some of our most significant technological innovations.BBC World Service programme Digital Planet, explored three of the many unique initiatives in education technology.

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"Twitter claims a 90 percent accuracy rate for the clever techniques it uses to learn the gender of any given user. Glenn Fleishman reports on a the company's disconcerting new analytics tools, the research behind them, and how large a pinch of salt they come with."

"The two titans leading the pack are Google and Microsoft. The first battle? A new domain in artificial intelligence called "Deep Learning.""

"The really significant thing about AlphaGo is that it (and its creators) cannot explain its moves. And yet it plays a very difficult game expertly. So it's displaying a capability eerily similar to what we call intuition - "knowledge obtained without conscious reasoning". Up to now, we have regarded that as an exclusively human prerogative. It's what Newton was on about when he wrote "Hypotheses non fingo" in the second edition of his Principia: "I don't make hypotheses," he's saying, "I just know.""

"The researchers, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, and Timo Aila, came up with a new way of constructing a generative adversarial network, or GAN. GANs employ two dueling neural networks to train a computer to learn the nature of a data set well enough to generate convincing fakes. When applied to images, this provides a way to generate often highly realistic fakery. The same Nvidia researchers have previously used the technique to create artificial celebrities (read our profile of the inventor of GANs, Ian Goodfellow)."

"learning to play a musical instrument, you have to play the same songs and scales over and over again. YouTube's algorithm doesn't seem to know this, and so it demonetized a piano tutorial channel for "Repetitious content.""

"This month, in an open-access study published in PLOS One, a team reported the first brain implant system that lets patients use their thoughts to navigate an off-the-shelf Android tablet. Compared to previous generations, this system doesn't require training-for example, learning to type on a different, non-QWERTY keyboard-or specialized interface equipment. With just her thoughts, T6 was able to send emails, chat with other paralyzed patients in the trial, Google random questions, and even shop on Amazon. For the first time since she became paralyzed, T6 regained access to the entire commercially-available Google Play ecosystem and the digital world."

"In the meantime, Pham is keen to see if robots can learn to build the chair using only an image of the assembled product as a guide. Will the technology ever help humans who struggle with the task? "I don't think it is in Ikea's business model to have robots assemble their chairs," he said. "In the next 10 to 20 years, people will still be sweating over flat-pack furniture.""