Closing the loop in distance education using generative AI | Ashwin Gopinath | TEDxBoston

So I'm going to be talking about education. So let's start with what education actually means. Education, if you look at the definition in the dictionary, it shows up as it's like systematic transfer of information from A teacher to a student. So it's basically one-way communication of information from an entity to another entity. And this is what typically happens in most of the schools and most of the classes and themes and variations of it. I mean, if you keep this as the idea, what would AI do to the education? It would be sort of like rather than a human, you have some robot or some system or some automated thing like ChatGPT, which you interact with and it's transferring information. And there are different themes and variations of it. It's basically delivering lectures, it's creating, let's say, videos and giving you content in that fashion. But you already have things like this. So if you were to think about it as purely one-dimensional transfer of information, you have platforms like OpenCourseWare as well as a whole bunch of other things, whether it is Khan Academy, Byju's in India, a whole bunch of other things. And these have proliferated in the last couple of years, wherein you have videos of lectures or it may be a Zoom Zoom session wherein a professor or a teacher is giving information to a bunch of people all over the world. Now, what's missing here? If you were to think about it from an education perspective, it's delivering on the promise of giving information from one side to the other. I mean, it might be different multimedia, or it might be an individual, it might be a chatbot, whatever it is. But the reality is that education is a two-way street. Think back to your favorite teacher, it was not the amount of knowledge that he or she had. It's the way they interacted with you. They learned with you. They modulated the information so that you understood it. And now that I am on this side of teaching, I realize that I also learn a lot as I interact with students. And that is what real education is about. It's not about how much content you have. So if you have an all-knowing chatbot that has all the knowledge in the world, it's not enough. It needs to interact with you and work with you so that you understand it. Now, how do you build this? How do you build this into— there are 2 ways in which you can do it. One is you can reimagine education from scratch and say it needs to look something like ChatGPT, or it needs to look something like, you know, Bing Search or whatever else might come across and you are interacting with it. But what about all the content that already exists? So how do you take all the lecture notes and all the lecture videos and all of this that has been generated? Can you still reuse it? Or do we need to reimagine classroom from scratch? So what we are trying to do is basically we looked at these interfaces wherein you have a lecture or you have like some kind of a multimedia window wherein you have information that is being presented. And then there is, in most of the websites, it's not just in YouTube, you have this dumpster fire of a section which is basically comments. It's for 1% of the world that basically speaks the loudest, and even smaller percentage of it is something useful. And it's all done in the guise of engagement. So the question that we started asking ourselves is, can we actually completely reimagine this? Can we think of the comment section which exists on every website, pretty much every web page, but you— and especially in YouTube— and rather than actually having comments, can we actually have this as a section wherein you are interfacing with the comment itself? Think about it. So the video is sort of like me talking to you. And the comment section is you guys kind of talking to each other. That's what's happening. But there is no communication between the content and the individuals sitting there. But now we can reimagine that. Just taking this section, you just scroll down and now you can start talking back to the video and the video starts talking back to you based upon the content. So if there is something going on there, like there is a visual there and you want to just talk about it as Stop the video and you start talking to it. And you can also integrate the comment section into it. You can, you can have the individuals speaking as well. And all of that gets integrated into a single system and you don't need to change anything. You just need to change the comment section. Now, that's what we are building. And what does that give you? You can start extending this a little bit further and start asking the question, can you imagine where in every comment section or every piece of information that is available on the internet, you have digital twins of those sections that you are interacting with. So it becomes— the engagement changes completely, wherein you are no longer talking among each other or talking among the individuals that is there. But on top of it, you're interacting with the content itself or the content creator itself in that personality itself. So the teacher— and so it learns about you and it knows what you know. It knows what you like to interact with and contextualizes it. It changes within the existing framework itself. We can just add that and build that. So can we use this common section? Basically, just throw away what is not working, but you're comfortable with it. And then just use that as a section wherein you close the loop. And these are going to start coming out from our lab sometime in the next several months. I'll stop there. And yep, thank you.