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A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

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Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#111

Post by grayclhn »

qb45 wrote: post #37
grayclhn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd be surprised at how often students don't read webpages and fire off an email to the class TA or instructor. Replying with a link to the relevant part of the webpage is something I'd love to automate. (I teach a largish introductory university class)

You can automate replying with a link to the course webpage ToC. Also, make it absolutely clear that the reply is automatic. Hopefully they'll get the hint. Or heck, just make it a policy that if they haven't received an answer in a week, this means they need to look at the website. I don't know why some people strive to be so accommodating to laziness nowadays.

There are lots of things I could do that would be less work but would come across as "being an asshole" to many students. A smart chatbot would be less work, more helpful, and a better experience for the students.

Most technology is fundamentally about accommodating laziness. There's nothing "nowadays" about it.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#112

Post by nairboon »

eternalban wrote: post #47
wyldfire wrote: post #4

That's stunning. I studied AI in undergrad and I just didn't give it enough of my focus at the time. Little did I know that in my lifetime I'd see real world evidence of computers passing the Turing Test with flying colors. Of course, Turing was right. What's outside of the set of computable sets? Not much! I recently read an article headline that talked about creeps using AI to stalk porn stars. It's interesting to…

> What's outside of the set of computable sets? Human intution can jump. Mechanical deduction must expend energy. Let me give you an example: Dmitri Mendeleev goes to bed, has a dream, and then delivers the periodic table . Can your machine do that?

Where is the jump? There was a lot of computation preceding his dream, how is that different from deduction?

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#113

Post by hrkristian »

alexcaps wrote: post #43

This sounded cool until, "Now Goel is forming a business to bring the chatbot to the wider world of education.” // are all educators just trying to create companies these days?

Education could use such an overhaul to be honest. Look at internet resources like Khan Academy and how they're proving the merits of mass-distributing a well-functioning formula for teaching.

As far as this bot is concerned it seems to do one thing very well: Reducing the costs of offering a teaching method for those who require "human interaction" to learn optimally (spoonfeeding if you want).

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#114

Post by iBzOtaku »

SilasX wrote: post #81
forrestbrazeal wrote: post #73

I was a student in this class, and had at least one question on the forum answered (correctly) by Jill. I can see this technology being hugely useful for teachers who conduct large lecture classes in any subject on a regular basis. That said, I'd be even more excited if Jill had the ability to synthesize new answers to questions through some type of case-based reasoning. This would require Jill receiving feedback on…

If you had some reddit/HN-style forum where the questions get replies and votes, that would be valuable information for what counts as a "good answer".

If I recall correctly, https://piazza.com/ does something similar to this and I believe they also have voting on a "best" answer as well.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#115

Post by specialist »

pm wrote: post #93
adekok wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Laziness. It's usually faster to ask someone a question than to look up the answer. :( My common answer is "If you're too lazy to read the documentation, I'm too lazy to cut & paste it into the email". Followed by them complaining about how I'm an asshole...

I did this with my brother. Would always ask me beginner programming questions instead of getting Google-fu (while running a business making FileMaker Pro integrations, ugh). Eventually I LMGTFY. He stopped asking.

I bitly my LMGTFY. The passive/aggressive nerd Rick Rolling.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#116

Post by qb45 »

grayclhn wrote: post #111
qb45 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can automate replying with a link to the course webpage ToC. Also, make it absolutely clear that the reply is automatic. Hopefully they'll get the hint. Or heck, just make it a policy that if they haven't received an answer in a week, this means they need to look at the website. I don't know why some people strive to be so accommodating to laziness nowadays.

There are lots of things I could do that would be less work but would come across as "being an asshole" to many students. A smart chatbot would be less work, more helpful, and a better experience for the students. Most technology is fundamentally about accommodating laziness. There's nothing "nowadays" about it.

Well, but you don't have this bot and instead (I suppose) you waste your private time responding with links to something they should have read.

You don't have to be an asshole, just refuse to be mistreated by assholes.

I've seen a friend of mine, who is a university teacher, respond at midnight to stupid question about some deadline the student should have known since two months. If your experience is anything like that, know that there are people finding it insane.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#117

Post by pm »

specialist wrote: post #115
pm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did this with my brother. Would always ask me beginner programming questions instead of getting Google-fu (while running a business making FileMaker Pro integrations, ugh). Eventually I LMGTFY. He stopped asking.

I bitly my LMGTFY. The passive/aggressive nerd Rick Rolling.

That's gold. I'm going to use that one next time.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#118

Post by vinodkd »

patrickbolle wrote: post #71
lpage wrote: post #51

For anyone interested, the class, which covers interactive intelligence and knowledge based AI, is freely available at https://www.udacity.com/course/knowledge-based-ai-cognitive-... . It's a great starting point if you're looking to automate the sort of human intelligence tasks that don't lend themselves well to the traditional searching/planning/proving/minimax/retrieval route that underpins most AI. I took it befo…

thanks for the link ! question though does anybody have any good resources for doing something similar to this in javascript? I know a small amount of java, no python, and want to brush up my js skills anyways.

IIRC there was nothing specific to java or python, except for using opencv for the last exercise to visually solve ravens matrices. You could do the same with nodejs, I'd presume. It might be easier too, considering most of the code involved manipulating dynamic data structures.

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#119

Post by vinodkd »

ikeboy wrote: post #9

>Goel and his teaching assistants receive more than 10,000 questions a semester from students on the course's online forum. Is this normal?

The article got the numbers wrong, but that course was especially active when I took it, and I was taking it the second time it was offered. Still the best course in the OMSCS program that I've taken. Very lively, helpful and deep discussions, some of which had individual responses going into thousands of words.

The course itself was very innovative in its directions and tests because it asked questions that compared and contrasted human and artificial intelligence. That not just got people's creative juices going, but also made it relatable. More than one person related the artificial learning we were imparting to the code with our own learning processes - or that of our children.

The instructors (Dr.Goel and Dr.Joyner) also used it as a chance to compare the online vs on-campus versions of the course with some interesting results (tldr: the online version was OOM better due to student participation, which was likely due to self-selection of early adopters of the OMSCS program, but still worthwhile).

Re: A professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

#120

Post by kennydude »

collyw wrote: post #25

Rather than inventing sophisticated chat bots, couldn't he have just had a well organised web page? If the question were where is assignment two / when is assignment due. The examples given seem like a "high tech" (possibly unreliable) solution to a low tech problem.

My computer science lecturers can't even put together a webpage so yeah it is asking a lot. (They didn't close tags in their tables for some bizarre reason)
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