Instructure: Plans to expand beyond Canvas LMS into machine learning and AI — from mfeldstein.com by Phill Hill
Excerpts:
On the same day as Instructure’s earnings call and release of FY2018 financial results, the company announced the acquisition of Portfolium for $43 million, a small startup focusing on “ePortfolio network, student-centered assessment, job matching capabilities, and academic and co-curricular pathways”.
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Instructure now views itself as a company with a suite of products, and they are much more open to using corporate M&A to build this portfolio.
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We already have analytical capabilities in our Canvas platform. I want to be really clear and delineate the difference between an analytics and reporting capability, and a machine learning and AI platform.
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We have the most comprehensive database on the educational experience in the globe. So given that information that we have, no one else has those data assets at their fingertips to be able to develop those algorithms and predictive models.
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What’s even more interesting and compelling is that we can take that information, correlate it across all sorts of universities, curricula, etc, and we can start making recommendations and suggestions to the student or instructor in how they can be more successful. Watch this video, read this passage, do problems 17-34 in this textbook, spend an extra two hours on this or that. When we drive student success, we impact things like retention, we impact the productivity of the teachers, and it’s a huge opportunity. That’s just one small example. Our DIG initiative, it is first and foremost a platform for ML and AI, and we will deliver and monetize it by offering different functional domains of predictive algorithms and insights. Maybe things like student success, retention, coaching and advising, career pathing, as well as a number of the other metrics that will help improve the value of an institution or connectivity across institutions.
Law schools escalate their focus on digital skills — from edtechmagazine.com by Eli Zimmerman
Coding, data analytics and device integration give students the tools to become more efficient lawyers.
Excerpt:
Participants learned to use analytics programs and artificial intelligence to complete work in a fraction of the time it usually takes.
For example, students analyzed contracts using AI programs to find errors and areas for improvement across various legal jurisdictions. In another exercise, students learned to use data programs to draft nondisclosure agreements in less than half an hour.
By learning analytics models, students will graduate with the skills to make them more effective — and more employable — professionals.
“As advancing technology and massive data sets enable lawyers to answer complex legal questions with greater speed and efficiency, courses like Legal Analytics will help KU Law students be better advocates for tomorrow’s clients and more competitive for tomorrow’s jobs,” Stephen Mazza, dean of the University of Kansas School of Law, tells Legaltech News.
Reflecting that shift, the Law School Admission Council, which organizes and distributes the Law School Admission Test, will be offering the test exclusively on Microsoft Surface Go tablets starting in July 2019.
From DSC:
I appreciate the article, thanks Eli. From one of the articles that was linked to, it appears that, “To facilitate the transition to the Digital LSAT starting July 2019, LSAC is procuring thousands of Surface Go tablets that will be loaded with custom software and locked down to ensure the integrity of the exam process and security of the test results.”
From DSC:
Our family uses AT&T for our smartphones and for our Internet access. What I would really like from AT&T is to be able to speak into an app — either located on a smartphone or have their routers morph into Alexa-type of devices — to be able to speak to what I want my router to do:
“Turn off Internet access tonight from 9pm until 6am tomorrow morning.”
“Only allow Internet access for parents’ accounts.”
“Upgrade my bandwidth for the next 2 hours.”
Upon startup, the app would ask whether I wanted to setup any “admin” types of accounts…and, if so, would recognize that voice/those voices as having authority and control over the device.
Would you use this type of interface? I know I would!
P.S. I’d like to be able to speak to our
thermostat in that sort of way as well.
Blockchain Deployment Checklist — from The Journal by Sara Friedman
While the technology is still in the nascent stages, blockchain-based education systems have the potential to revolutionize how school districts manage student data.
From DSC:
Unfortunately, the checklist provided in this solid article was too long and complicated…it needs to be streamlined. But I think it’s likely that we’ll see more products out there in the future that will remove these complexities.
Along these lines, I think we’ll see cloud-based learner profiles in the future. Throughout our lifetimes, we will own the data and direct who can — and can’t — access it.
Also see:
Is this South Africa’s best legal online platform using blockchain? — from techfinancials.co.za
The winners of the event, Kagiso, will progress to the second round of the contest, in which a panel of international judges will decide who attends a grand final in New York.
Excerpt:
The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL) and leading global law firm Baker McKenziehave announced the winners of the South African leg of Global Legal Hackathon 2019 (GLH2019).
First prize went to Kagiso, an online mediation platform that provides a cost-effective and fast alternative to lengthy court processes for civil disputes.
Kagiso uses machine learning to match cases with professional mediators who have the most relevant skill sets to be effective – such as subject matter experience or knowledge of local languages – and stores records using blockchain technology.
The second prize was awarded to Bua, a voice-recognition system that allows victims of crime to record their own statements in their own language in a private “safe space” such as a kiosk or on their own phone.
The majority of crimes in South Africa’s go unreported or prosecutions fail, and a leading reason is that victims don’t feel comfortable giving statements in open police stations, and statements are often badly or wilfully mistranslated.
The Global Legal Hackathon is a non-profit organization that organizes law schools, law firms and in-house departments, legal technology companies, governments, and service providers to innovation in the legal industry – across the globe. It brings together the best thinkers, doers and practitioners in law in support of a unified vision: rapid development of solutions to improve the legal industry, world-wide.
From DSC:
Glancing through the awards likely shows where the future of the legal field is going…at least in part.
Also see:
Microsoft built a chat bot to match patients to clinical trials — from fortune.com by Dina Bass
Excerpt:
A chat bot that began as a hackathon project at Microsoft’s lab in Israel makes it easier for sick patients to find clinical trials that could provide otherwise unavailable medicines and therapies.
The Clinical Trials Bot lets patients and doctors search for studies related to a disease and then answer a succession of text questions. The bot then suggests links to trials that best match the patients’ needs. Drugmakers can also use it to find test subjects.
Half of all clinical trials for new drugs and therapies never reach the number of patients needed to start, and many others are delayed for the same reason, Bitran said. Meanwhile patients, sometimes desperately sick, find it hard to comb through the roughly 50,000 trials worldwide and their arcane and lengthy criteria—typically 20 to 30 factors. Even doctors struggle to search quickly on behalf of patients, Bitran said.
The 10+ best real-world examples of augmented reality — from forbes.com by Bernard Marr
Excerpt:
Augmented reality (AR) can add value, solve problems and enhance the user experience in nearly every industry. Businesses are catching on and increasing investments to drive the growth of augmented reality, which makes it a crucial part of the tech economy.
As referenced by Bernard in his above article:
From DSC:
Along these lines, I really appreciate the “translate” feature within Twitter. It helps open up whole new avenues of learning for me from people across the globe. A very cool, practical, positive, beneficial feature/tool!!!
Horizon Report Preview 2019 — from library.educause.edu
Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Badges and Credentialing, Blended Learning, Blockchain, Digital Learning, Digital Literacy, Extended Reality (XR), Instructional Design, Instructional Technologies, Learning Analytics, Learning Space, Mobile Learning, Student Learning Support, Teaching and Learning
Abstract
The EDUCAUSE Horizon Report Preview provides summaries of each of the upcoming edition’s trends, challenges, and important developments in educational technology, which were ranked most highly by the expert panel. This year’s trends include modularized and disaggregated degrees, the advancing of digital equity, and blockchain.
For more than a decade, EDUCAUSE has partnered with the New Media Consortium (NMC) to publish the annual Horizon Report – Higher Education Edition. In 2018, EDUCAUSE acquired the rights to the NMC Horizon project.
Police across the US are training crime-predicting AIs on falsified data — from technologyreview.com by Karen Hao
A new report shows how supposedly objective systems can perpetuate corrupt policing practices.
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
Despite the disturbing findings, the city entered a secret partnership only a year later with data-mining firm Palantir to deploy a predictive policing system. The system used historical data, including arrest records and electronic police reports, to forecast crime and help shape public safety strategies, according to company and city government materials. At no point did those materials suggest any effort to clean or amend the data to address the violations revealed by the DOJ. In all likelihood, the corrupted data was fed directly into the system, reinforcing the department’s discriminatory practices.
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But new research suggests it’s not just New Orleans that has trained these systems with “dirty data.” In a paper released today, to be published in the NYU Law Review, researchers at the AI Now Institute, a research center that studies the social impact of artificial intelligence, found the problem to be pervasive among the jurisdictions it studied. This has significant implications for the efficacy of predictive policing and other algorithms used in the criminal justice system.
“Your system is only as good as the data that you use to train it on,” says Kate Crawford, cofounder and co-director of AI Now and an author on the study.
How AI is enhancing wearables — from techopedia.com by Claudio Butticev
Takeaway: Wearable devices have been helping people for years now, but the addition of AI to these wearables is giving them capabilities beyond anything seen before.
Excerpt:
Restoring Lost Sight and Hearing – Is That Really Possible?
People with sight or hearing loss must face a lot of challenges every day to perform many basic activities. From crossing the street to ordering food on the phone, even the simplest chore can quickly become a struggle. Things may change for these struggling with sight or hearing loss, however, as some companies have started developing machine learning-based systems to help the blind and visually impaired find their way across cities, and the deaf and hearing impaired enjoy some good music.
German AI company AiServe combined computer vision and wearable hardware (camera, microphone and earphones) with AI and location services to design a system that is able to acquire data over time to help people navigate through neighborhoods and city blocks. Sort of like a car navigation system, but in a much more adaptable form which can “learn how to walk like a human” by identifying all the visual cues needed to avoid common obstacles such as light posts, curbs, benches and parked cars.
From DSC:
So once again we see the pluses and minuses of a given emerging technology. In fact, most technologies can be used for good or for ill. But I’m left with asking the following questions:
One other reflection here…it’s the combination of some of these emerging technologies that will be really interesting to see what happens in the future…again, for good or for ill.
The question is:
How can we weigh in?
Also relevant/see:
AI Now Report 2018 — from ainowinstitute.org, December 2018
Excerpt:
University AI programs should expand beyond computer science and engineering disciplines. AI began as an interdisciplinary field, but over the decades has narrowed to become a technical discipline. With the increasing application of AI systems to social domains, it needs to expand its disciplinary orientation. That means centering forms of expertise from the social and humanistic disciplines. AI efforts that genuinely wish to address social implications cannot stay solely within computer science and engineering departments, where faculty and students are not trained to research the social world. Expanding the disciplinary orientation of AI research will ensure deeper attention to social contexts, and more focus on potential hazards when these systems are applied to human populations.
Furthermore, it is long overdue for technology companies to directly address the cultures of exclusion and discrimination in the workplace. The lack of diversity and ongoing tactics of harassment, exclusion, and unequal pay are not only deeply harmful to employees in these companies but also impacts the AI products they release, producing tools that perpetuate bias and discrimination.
The current structure within which AI development and deployment occurs works against meaningfully addressing these pressing issues. Those in a position to profit are incentivized to accelerate the development and application of systems without taking the time to build diverse teams, create safety guardrails, or test for disparate impacts. Those most exposed to harm from 42 these systems commonly lack the financial means and access to accountability mechanisms that would allow for redress or legal appeals. 233 This is why we are arguing for greater funding for public litigation, labor organizing, and community participation as more AI and algorithmic systems shift the balance of power across many institutions and workplaces.
Also relevant/see:
Mirrorworld v. AR Cloud or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the spatial future — from medium.com by Ori Inbar
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
An exact digital replica of the real world is an essential infrastructure, but it’s only part of the meaning of the new spatial computing platform. Unless you are Snow White’s step mother (or Lord Farquaad), the mirror is merely a reflection of the real world; it doesn’t enhance it. The Augmented content overlaid on top of the world’s digital replica is what’s really interesting: “context, meaning, and function” in Kelly’s words. Without it — it’s like the Internet before the Web — great potential, used by few. Hence my initial instinct to include Augmented Reality in the moniker. So should we keep looking for a better term that captures the “augmented” sauce on top of the mirror ? Can’t we simply settle on “Spatial Computing”…?
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Ask any millennial and she’ll confirm: “I need info about what’s in front of me right now” — what’s this Restaurant, this object, that person? And she is sick of searching it the old fashioned way.
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The New Spatial Economy
Changing how information is organized will profoundly disrupt the Web economy. A handful of companies became giants thanks to the current model. No wonder they are all contenders in the battle for AR Cloud dominance. The Web Economy was defined by “clicks on links” (CPM/CPC). The AR Cloud-based spatial economy will transition to what I like to call “clicks on bricks” — a punning rhyme that captures a new world where everything is driven by digital interaction with the physical world.
From DSC:
Hmmm….where everything is driven by digital interaction with the physical world.
Augmented Reality is the operations system of the future. AR cloud is how we get there. — from forbes.com by John Koetsier
Excerpt:
In the future, every object will be smart.
Not necessarily because everything will be made of “smart matter,” with chips, motors, sensors, and radios (although this is happening). But increasingly because we are starting to digitally paint over default reality, layering on data, insights, and entertainment in virtual or augmented layers. When we shift from smartphones to smartglasses over the next decade, this will only accelerate.
From games to street directions to metadata, from industrial heads-up displays to virtual gamescapes to workspace information, these new augmented, virtual, and extended realities will be aware, data-rich, contextual, and interactive.
But there is a core enabling technology required.
And I’m not just talking about smartglasses hardware with great functionality, good usability, and a reasonable price, which are probably at least three to five years away.
I’m talking about the augmented reality cloud.
Also relevant/see:
