ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION Speaker -Dr. Manish Gupta


CEMCA under its Higher Education initiatives conducted a Webinar on the topic: Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education on June 26, 2020. The expert speaker of the session was Dr. Manish Gupta. Dr. Manish Gupta is the Director of Google Research India, a new AI research lab recently announced by Google. He holds an additional appointment as Infosys Foundation Chair Professor at IIIT Bangalore. Previously, Manish has led Video Ken, a video technology startup, and the research centers for Xerox and IBM in India.

Prof. Madhu Parhar introduced and welcomed Dr. Gupta and invited him to deliver his talk.

Dr Gupta started his presentation by mentioning the current situation of COVID-19 Pandemic, he said that COVID 19 situation is raising the need of online learning globally and teachers are using online techniques for teaching and learning. There are various tools available for the online learning ie Google Classroom etc. The Google Assessment and Google Search Engine are being used for higher engagement from the end learners. Today’s topic of the webinar is concerned with the target field of education to enhance the experience of user. User navigate to a specific topic of their interest in videos. All these things are made possible with the ‘Artificial Intelligence techniques.

He explained that Speech recognition and AI Speech recognition is one such technology that is empowered by AI to add convenience to its users. This new technology has the power to convert voice messages to text. And it also can recognize an individual based on their voice command.

Google Assistant is an artificial intelligence–powered  virtual assistant developed by Google that is primarily available on mobile and smart home devices. Unlike the company's previous virtual assistant, Google Now, the Google Assistant can engage in two-way conversations. It enables the talk to add in conversation and had a huge hit. It is useful for the students for discussion and further to engage them for dialogue and solve their query which is a contributory action.

Google is expanding its suite of apps designed for the Indian market with today's launch of a new language-learning app aimed at children, called Bolo. It encourages and corrects the child when they read aloud. It is an engaging way for the kids to learn language.

There are two apps which are now available - Speech App and Game App and both are engaging but science behind these app is continuously an issue.

Online and Blended learning is the need of current scenario in which face to face classroom teaching and online learning based on LMS and video lectures all components should be used.

Google is collaborating with Pratham books which are democratizing access to books so that every child can discover the joy of reading. The storybooks are published in a range of mother tongue languages and formats to get children to read more. It has changed the face of world by changing learning methods into digital transformation.

Currently the key points of learning are Learning to Learn and Lifelong Learning.

Following are the points of relevance to adopt AI as teaching-learning tool:-

  1. In learning Videos there is too much content including junk and fake material is available. Sometimes the resources are neither high quality nor relevant. The learner needs personalized curated form of contents instead of 1000 video content available online.

  2. Users navigate to a specific topic of their interest in every video as it is cumbersome to navigate in video unlike text. AI helps to convert the topics into several segments and use it like a digital textbook which is easier to use and share.

  3. There is an engagement issue, as very quickly we feel disengaged while watching movies if they are not interesting.

The above issues may be described in terms of AI. There are several content, video searching, indexing are available online. With the help of table icons, video icons one can easily see visibly and highlighted icons. In cloud, Table of contents, Phrases and videos may be searched. It increases value to learning. It gives more choices to select video of your choice.

AI supports in video search, if you are watching one hour video and you have to revisit to cover the doubts with the help of indexing one could get the relevant part of videos. Start and Stop markers are provided.
 

Aptech and VideoKem are providing online learning tools.

He explained about VideoKen Inc which is an AI product company headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, United States with a subsidiary in Bangalore, India. It works on advanced video indexing technologies, which are built on a foundation of cutting-edge research involving big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The video clips of any given topic arbitrary to the list, quiz, presentation and question – answers may be shared. In this method learning may support with the videos to encourage learners and make learning easy.

AI is used in gaming, research problems, ranking of videos, personalized recommendations, analysis of content, engagement prediction, modulation of voice, hand gestures.

At the end, few questions were raised by participants and he gave following tips:

  1. Deep Learning Machine is very helpful. It does the work which needs to be done by hand and gives high accuracy.

  2. LMS may be integrated with AI.

  3. Curated Indexing of videos may be used standalone.

  4. Meta data search engine table of content may be used to find out videos.

  5. ICTS, Bangalore has repository of videos which are being used by students.

  6. AI ensures the efficiency at workplace