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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Atlanta, GA | Posted: January 24, 2020
Joshua Preston
Research Communications Manager
GVU Center and College of Computing
Summary Sentence:
Georgia Tech’s most well-known artificially intelligent teaching assistant, Jill Watson, turns four years old this January.
Full Summary:
Georgia Tech’s most well-known artificially intelligent teaching assistant, Jill Watson, turns four years old this January.
Timeline: Jill Watson AI at 4Georgia Tech’s most well-known artificially intelligent teaching assistant, Jill Watson, turns four years old this January. The brainchild of Ashok Goel, professor in Interactive Computing, and launched at the start of 2016, the virtual TA was introduced into one of the courses for the then-fledgling Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program, now one of Georgia Tech’s largest graduate degree programs.
Students and faculty would be forgiven in thinking Jill Watson is a single teaching assistant. Each course that utilizes the Jill TA has its own custom “knowledge base” that the AI leverages to answer basic student questions 24/7.
In addition, a new AI, the Jill Social Agent, was designed and launched in 2019 to explicitly connect students quickly and get them working together. The agent was developed in part as a response to high attrition rates that plague online learning in general.
The lead architect for the Jill Social Agent, Ida Camacho, OMSCS ’19, discusses the AI on an episode of the Tech Unbound Podcast from the GVU Center. It’s a fascinating inside look at Camacho’s approach to building social structures for online education and her own journey as an OMSCS student.
Other major milestones from the Jill TA in 2019:
The new decade promises more educational advances made possible by the Jill Watson AI framework. Learn more at emprize.gatech.edu.
