Dev Aditya Dr Pauldy Otermans: Can AI Teach The World?

Dev Aditya: Today we are going to be talking about artificial intelligence, or AI. Don’t be worried. It’s not one of those talks about how evil AI can be or if it can enslave all of us. No. In fact, it’s going to be a talk about hope. Because one of the areas where we see tremendous hope from the potential use of AI is in teaching. Surprised? Let’s tell them why. Dr Pauldy Otermans: Recently, it was found that the world has a shortage of 65 to 68 million teachers. And just imagine that each of those would teach 100 students only. That would mean that approximately 680 million students are without a teacher. The pandemic has also put immense stress on our teachers. And this has led to the prediction that many teachers will leave the profession in the next 4 years. Hence, given these recent trends I think we have a very worrying picture that this global shortage of teachers is only increasing. Now, this shortage, we believe, is the biggest factor currently contributing to the global skills and education gap. Let us tell you how. DA: So today we have over a trillion megabytes of data being created every day. So it’s so much new data, and with our search engines already having connected most of the information on earth, content needed to learn is not short by any stretch of the imagination. Right? But that's where the importance of a teacher comes in. Let's just think about the 680 million students we just spoke about. They wouldn’t be able to find what to learn in that sea of knowledge. And even if they did, every now and then they would come across some topics or some courses that they wouldn’t be able to understand without a guiding hand. Let’s just think about a first time learner. How can we expect, that a person who is the first person in their family to enter education, learn without a teacher. And just to add to this, if that was actually possible, don’t you think we could have already solved this gap simply by distributing free books and through YouTube and Khan Academy? PO: And think about yourself. If you were to be placed in a year six class at the right age, and given books on algebra and trigonometry, would you be able to make sense of it? Or be able to be motivated to learn it in the first place without a guiding teacher? Now, this guidance, this motivation and this accountability is what is currently provided by teachers. DA: And even for us, as Ottoman Institute, when we taught students across ten countries during the pandemic, a time when over a billion students were pulled out of their classrooms from U.N. camps to remote villages, we found this: while some of them appreciated the length of our program and some spoke about some of the topics that we had taught, every single one of the students spoke about the teacher being the most important aspect in their learning journeys. And I think all of us in this room are also privy to the importance of teachers during the pandemic. And just think about this. Would you have left your children with their textbooks and perhaps given them access to yet another EdTech platform for a year and a half and just perceived - and just thought that their learning would be all right? Well, if teaching is so important, but at a time when we have such a massive shortage of teachers -which is only growing- and even from a quality point of view, all of us understand, right, that no two human beings teach in the same way. Then how can we teach the global population? Well, we believe and have done this using artificial intelligence. PO: So, “why AI for teaching?” you may wonder. Today, the young population in the world is growing disproportionately, with countries like India churning out a million adults every single month. Whilst this is the case, 800 million people do not have access to safe, clean drinking water. And a hundred million primary school children cannot go to school. Building new schools takes a very, very long time. And cannot properly be achieved when we don’t have the basic amenities like safe and clean drinking water. Whilst on the other hand though, what we do see is a global penetration of smartphone technology. DA: And it’s just not about smartphones today. Today we are in the era of 5G connectivity and we have satellite Internet connecting the remotest parts of the world. Some of these parts being connected would not be fathomable even a year ago. So today that means we have millions of people who still don’t have access to schools, let alone quality teachers. And some, even in the 21st century, don’t have access to clean drinking water. But what they have access to is this - a smartphone. And yes, it’s true. Just to shed some more light on this historic period of time that we are in, just in 2020 there were 6 billion smartphones in use, and this is going to increase to 7.3 billion just in the next four years. PO: While that does not mean that necessarily everyone on Earth will have a smartphone, it clearly reflects the growth in this area compared to other forms of infrastructure like clean water or schools. DA: And it is using this technology, it is using this Internet infrastructure today that we are giving to the world a humanlike conversational AI teacher for everyone in their pockets. It’s available for anyone who wants to learn 24/7 at almost negligible cost. If needed, students no longer have to go to schools or even log in at a specific time. And perhaps most excitedly, it learns from your learning behavior to give you a personalized 1 to 1 teaching when you need it. And we call this OIAI. PO: OIAI is a conversation AI with 90 million data points that can converse on a variety of topics like a human. It can help you, give you a guiding hand, motivate you, engage with you, be your friend, among many other things. We make OIAI humanlike using deepfake technology. Yes, a positive use of an otherwise misconceived technology to make our learners feel like they’re interacting with a human rather than a chat bot or robot. DA: So our first creation or our first avatar of OIAI was Beatrice. Why Beatrice? Because she was named after our dear friend, who is Beatrice, who gladly volunteered to deep fake her as our avatar. So, meet Beatrice. (Applause) And we first deployed Beatrice in a UNHCR camp in northern Iraq to teach some of the learners there on how to set goals. And we had to do this completely remotely, of course, because of the pandemic at that time. And, boy, was that a journey! And I still remember the very first version of Beatrice. It could only work on Google Chrome and was a very basic web app. PO: And many of the learners in the camp, whose English is not native and far from being fluent, had old phones and did not have or did not know how to download Chrome. DA: So there I was for about an hour, trying to explain to these students what to do. And to be frank, the last 15 minutes was just hopeless silence. You know that feeling that you get in your gut, that what I wanted to do or show today is just not going to happen. But just then, in the WhatsApp group we had created to communicate with all of these students in the camp, a girl we knew wrote: “She spoke to me.” And that was the time that gave the entire team tremendous motivation to keep developing Beatrice. And what we found over the next couple of weeks was, as we kept introducing Beatrice to them, a lot of the learners actually started liking to learn more from Beatrice than from me. DA: So after introducing the learners to Beatrice, and gathering detailed feedback from them about our interactions, we found something interesting. The learners in the camp said they found Beatrice to be warm, with a social presence, motivating, trustworthy, useful - in other words, they found her humanlike. Interestingly though, they did not say words like: information sharing, knowledge, content. Those are characteristics one would normally attribute to a teacher. Today we are working on version 4 of Beatrice. DA: And that was not all. We then thought about accessibility. Because, let’s be frank, Beatrice was our web app, and not too many people know about Beatrice. And I’m sure, none of you knew before we came here today. So we thought, “Is there a way we could take OIAI and plug her into other education platforms so that it could serve their learners?” Remember, our core goal is not to create content - that’s been done already. Our goal is to support teaching and learning outcomes. Something that’s done by teachers and some things we believe are the most important aspects of actually reducing this global skills and education gap. So in our first attempt to do this, we created an AI coach that we stuck to a tech platform in Africa that was serving underserved women. Now, this AI coach did not have a human form like Beatrice, looked like a simple chat bot - only knew the name of the users and interacted with them through a series of few questions and buttons. But even then, this is what we found. PO: 72% of learners said they would return to the platform because they liked interacting with the AI coach. 74% of learners said they now knew what to learn next because they got motivated and inspired and mostly guided by this AI coach. Remember, something that is done by a teacher. In fact, the majority said they even thought the coach was present with them and made them feel warm during the interactions, despite only using words and not having a humanlike shape like Beatrice. DA: So as you can see, what we did with OIAI was not give learners more information or just give them more choice of what to learn next. For all you, Iphone lovers out there, I’m sure even Siri can do that. But what we actually did was create a humanlike, personalized AI teacher that not only understands your learning needs, but keeps developing that with every interaction they have with you. And through this, we hope to give the world a universal teacher. Because, after all, it’s not information giving only that a teacher does, right? PO: And on that note, I would like you all to take 5 seconds and think about your favorite teacher - we’ve all had one. DA: This is very important for us. And that’s because we believe to truly create that universal teacher that can teach anybody on Earth, we first need to understand what makes our favorite teacher a favorite for us. PO: And we broke this down into 5 categories, which we call MEJUH. MEJUH represents: motivation, encouragement, joy, understanding and hand-holding. MEJUH represents, we believe, the five core qualities that our favorite teacher has. And it’s those qualities that motivates us, guides us what to learn next and apply the knowledge that we are learning. Now we understood this by researching what is teaching, what does a teacher do, and perhaps most importantly, what do our learners need across ten countries. DA: So all of us have heard about how evil AI can be, right? And media has shown us about the ill uses of deepfake technology and other modern technologies. But hey, here we are, using the same technologies to solve what is perhaps the biggest social development challenge of modern society. Today, content is abundant but we need a teacher to come and understand our learning journeys, to challenge and test our knowledge, to show us what to learn next, to tell us which skills to develop, to actually become who we really want to become. PO: And today we are improving our OIAI with a billion more conversation points and even, to make it more humanlike, with the ability to empathize with learners. We are also using the same model to generate humanlike interactions for the hearing impaired community using sign language. But, it is not the technology that got us to where we are. It's our ability to understand the problem faced by millions at its core. DA: And it was that ability that allowed us to decipher what a teacher does first that has gotten us to where we are today. And AI, as a technology, was just the tool to build that solution. So next time you face a problem and you think that it’s worth solving for you or for millions around you, I urge you to look at its core first and to start solving its most basic components. Because the technology, no matter how it’s perceived, will always be just around the corner to help you build that solution. Thank you. (Applause)