The Connection, Inc Blog

Many students are taking advantage of online education, yet there are some pitfalls that can hold students back; namely, the lack of face-to-face interaction and assistance from the instructor. Now, artificially intelligent teaching assistants might be able to offer some reprieve to this issue.

You might remember how teaching assistants functioned from your own days at the university. They typically act as an aid to the professor, taking on responsibilities that professors don’t have time for, or simply don’t want to do, like administering tests, handing out homework assignments, and helping students who need assistance. In many cases, teaching assistants have been known to actually teach the class and lead in discussions. If students don’t get enough attention or are finding themselves falling behind, the teaching assistant is usually the first person they would go to for answers.

In order to fill this position for online classrooms, some universities have experimented with artificial intelligence programs called “bots” that can help students, should the need arise. One such bot, Jill Watson, was used as a TA for a class in Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence at the Georgia Institute of Technology to a degree of success. Jill helped students understand the core curriculum of the class, and wound up being so helpful that students couldn’t guess that “she” wasn’t a real person.

Online teaching focuses on learning management systems, many of which use a discussion board interface that’s designed to facilitate classroom-like discussion. Students can ask questions, which are answered by TAs or the professor. ComputerWorld reports that the KBAI class that’s offered every semester sees about 10,000 messages in its online forums, all of which need to be addressed. This is clearly too many messages and posts for just the TAs and the professor, so implementing an automated solution was a natural step forward.

Ashok Goel, the instructor of the KBAI class, explains that he and his team of graduate students had trained Jill on nearly 40,000 potential questions that have been asked since the class’s inauguration in the fall of 2014. Students that are invested in the subject matter will naturally ask questions, many of which are the same or similar, which makes AI the perfect way to respond to such inquiries.

At first, Jill had some difficulty working as a TA. Her answers would often be skewed off-topic or taken out of context by keywords. After some tweaking, Jill was capable of answering questions properly about 97 percent of the time. ComputerWorld states: “Initially, the human TAs would upload her successful responses to the students, but by the end of March, Jill didn’t need any assistance. She wrote to the class directly if she was 97 percent positive her answer was correct.”

This recent technology is also being used for many businesses. Utilizing automated “chatbot” solutions, businesses can divert some of their basic support to a carefully programmed AI. This AI is simply taught to look for certain keywords in questions, and then pulls up the appropriate answer to help the customer. In the event that the chatbot’s resources are exhausted and it can’t help the customer, it will drive the customer to a live person for a more hands-on approach. These solutions are reachable for small businesses, too - many of them just require time and careful planning to set up, so if you are tracking the types of questions that often bog down your customer service, you can automate them.

We tend to concentrate on the plus-side of working with recent technologies, but taking an objective approach is arguably the most important part of discussing new solutions. As robots continue to grow more realistic, will the line between humans and machines blur? Can developments such as these be good for society, or do they eliminate that which makes us human? Share your thoughts in the comments, and be sure to subscribe to our blog.

Hackers continue to innovate and cause trouble for businesses of all industries and sizes. One of the more interesting recent tactics includes utilizing a malicious Twitter account to command a botnet of Android devices to do its bidding. Twitoor is considered to be the first real threat to actively use a social network in this manner, making this a major cause for concern.

Did you know that over 2,000 Domino’s Pizza franchises in Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Japan, and Germany feature delivery by robot? Starship Technologies, a self-driving robotics company, announced on March 29th that they would be partnering with Domino’s to revolutionize the way the delivery process works.

It’s also worth mentioning that this development comes on the heels of the company’s projected growth estimates for the next five-to-ten years, predicting a worker shortage that the delivery robots can hopefully remedy in the long term. It’s just one way that modern enterprises are using technology to improve the way they run their organizations.

Domino’s Group CEO and Managing Director, Don Meji, states: “Robotic delivery units will complement our existing delivery methods, including cars, scooters, and e-bikes, ensuring our customers can get the hottest, freshest-made pizza delivered directly to them, wherever they are.”

Just think, maybe someday you can have a way to get fresh, delicious pizza delivered right to your front door via autonomous robot. Unfortunately, this does have some limitations. These robots can only deliver to customers within a one-mile radius of their designated Domino’s store, and that’s only in specific cities in Germany and the Netherlands. Also of note is that these battery-powered robots can only move along sidewalks at a speed of no more that four miles per hour, and can only carry a maximum of twenty pounds of food at a time.

The United States, among others, have also been looking into food delivery robots as valid opportunities over the past year. Some examples are U.S.-based companies Postmates and DoorDash. These companies have started to test Starship Technologies’ robots in multiple cities, but that doesn’t mean that you should expect to see robots at your door anytime soon, as only two states currently have legislation passed to make it legal for automated, ground-based robots to deliver food. The two states, Virginia and Idaho, may be joined shortly by other states that have pending legislation on the matter: Florida and Wisconsin.

In Idaho’s case, the state law lets local jurisdictions adopt their own regulations. This gives local governments authority to limit any delivery robot’s speed, and which location within the municipality they are allowed to be in use. If this technology takes hold in these places, many other states will almost certainly follow suit, even though there still is, admittedly, plenty of issues to square away, such as the cost of maintenance and security for these devices.

What are your thoughts about robots delivering pizza? Is it another marketing ploy by a company that is known for their outside-the-box thinking, or is it a viable (meaning cost-effective) alteration in Domino’s current business model? We’d love to read your thoughts in the comments section below.

Even if artificial intelligence is still a long ways off, people always try to emulate it and push it toward greater heights. One of the best, most recent examples, is how an artificially intelligent program co-wrote a short novel (or novella) that almost won the Hoshi Shinichi Award. If it won the award, it would have been groundbreaking, but the fact that it came so close to doing so begs the question: how long will it be before computers can emulate human creativity?

Robotics are making leaps and bounds in all sorts of different industries. Robots aid doctors with surgery, work in manufacturing plants, and perform countless other functions. Now, we can add “pizza delivery” to this list, thanks to a somewhat bizarre and extremely welcome innovation by the Domino’s pizza chain.