60,000 schools involving 120 million people in China start using AI in education system!

Aged 15, Shanghai students are on average three full years ahead of their counterparts in the UK or US in maths
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China’s children are its secret weapon in the global AI arms race
China wants to be the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. To get there, it's reinventing the way children are taught
By ALEX BEARD
Thursday 19 April 2018
Late on the night of October 4, 1957, Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev was at a reception at the Mariinsky Palace, in Kiev, Ukraine, when an aide called him to the telephone. The Soviet leader was gone a few minutes. When he reappeared at the reception, his son Sergei later recalled, Khrushchev’s face shone with triumph. “I can tell you some very pleasant and important news,” he told the assembled bureaucrats. “A little while ago, an artificial satellite of the Earth was launched.” From its remote Kazakh launchpad, Sputnik 1 had lifted into the night sky, blasting the Soviet Union into a decisive lead in the Cold War space race. News of the launch spread quickly. In the US, awestruck citizens wandered out into their backyards to catch a glimpse of the mysterious orb soaring high above them in the cosmos. Soon the public mood shifted to anger – then fear. Not since Pearl Harbour had their mighty nation experienced defeat. If the Soviets could win the space race, what might they do next? … for more, go to http://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-artificial-intelligence-education-superpower 

60,000 schools involving 120 million people in China start using AI in education system!

KUALA LUMPUR (June 2018): China has started using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mark student essays.

According to a South China Morning Post (SCMP) report, one in every four schools in China is quietly testing a powerful machine that uses AI to mark pupils’ work.

The technology is reportedly designed to understand the general logic and meaning of the text and make a reasonable, human-like judgment about the essay’s overall quality.

That's how futuristic China has ventured into teaching and education tools and systems in some 60,000 schools invol;ving 120 million people!

I Love Malaysia-China Silk Road opines that Malaysia’s Education Ministry needs a total overhaul in its teaching syllabus, programmes and strategy to suit the 21st Century digital world.

With many reports and claims that Malaysia lacked competent teachers to teach the English language, perhaps it is high time for the ministry to look into AI teaching tools and programmes to be implemented in the education system.

Here’s what is happening in China’s education system as reported by SCMP:

"China’s schools are quietly using AI to mark students’ essays ... but do the robots make the grade?

TECH NEWS
Monday, 28 May 2018
2:00 PM MYT
by stephen chen

Scientists insist the technology is designed to assist, rather than replace, human teachers. — SCMP

One in every four schools in China is quietly testing a powerful machine that uses artificial intelligence to mark pupils’ work, according to scientists involved in the government programme.


The technology is designed to understand the general logic and meaning of the text and make a reasonable, human-like judgment about the essay’s overall quality.

It then grades the work, adding recommended improvements in areas such as writing style, structure and theme.

The technology, which is being used in around 60,000 schools, is supposed to “think” more deeply and do more than a standard spellchecker.


Scientists insist the technology is designed to assist, rather than replace, human teachers.

It could help to reduce the amount of time teachers spend on grading essays and help them avoid inconsistencies caused by human errors such as lapses in attention or unconscious bias.

It could also help more students, especially those in remote areas with limited access to resources, improve their writing skills more quickly.

The machine is similar to the e-rater, an automated system used by the Education Testing Service in the US to grade prospective postgraduate students’ essays.

But unlike the e-rater, it can read both Chinese and English.

Artificial intelligence is developing rapidly in China with strong support from the government and the technology is used in many areas of everyday life.

But the extensive tests of the essay grading machine – built by some of the leading language processing teams involved in the government and military’s internet surveillance programme – were carried out with unusual security measures in place.

In most of the schools taking part in the programme, parents were not informed, access to the system terminals was limited to authorised staff, test results were strictly classified, and in some classes even the pupils were unaware that their work had been read and scored by a machine.


Wang Jing, director of academic affairs office in the High School Affiliated to Renmin University, one of the country’s most prestigious schools, said: “We are treating [the test] with extreme caution.

“What happens on campus stays on campus. The test results will not be revealed to the public,” he added, in line with the school’s agreement with the project organisers.

Most schools interviewed by the South China Morning Post – including the Baita Middle School in Nanchang, Sichuan province; the Fifth High School in Fuyang, Anhui and the 58th High School in Qingdao, Shandong – gave a similar assessment.

The schools said the AI grading machine was far from perfect, with teachers citing many examples where a brilliant piece of writing was given low marks.

The software is presently being used to mark only internal tests and none of the schools had plans to use the technology to grade essays in exams that would affect pupils’ official academic record.

“It’s still in its infancy,” Wang said.

But the developers say the machine is already 10 years old and they are increasingly confident about its potential.

A scientist involved in the project at the school of computer science and engineering at Beihang University in Beijing compared it to the AlphaGo, an AI Go player developed by Google which has defeated human world champions over the past couple of years.

The essay grading machine, embedded in a cluster of fast computers in Beijing, is improving its ability to understand human language by using deep learning algorithms to plough through essays written by Chinese students and “compare notes” with human teachers’ grading and comments.

It is also able to collect and build its own “knowledge base” with little or no human intervention.

“It has evolved continuously and become so complex, we no longer know for sure what it was thinking and how it made a judgment,” said the researcher, who requested not to be named due to the sensitivity of the project.


According to a government document seen by the South China Morning Post, the tests involved 60,000 schools with more than 120 million people involved.

The AI and human grader gave the same score 92% of the time, but the document did not specify the content and scale of the tests.

The researcher confirmed the figures but declined to reveal more details.

“In the future it may be used to relieve the teacher’s burden but it will never replace teachers. The machine has no soul,” he added.

The essay grading machine project was led by professor Zhou Jianshe, director of the research centre for language intelligence in China in Capital Normal University.

Zhou and other senior members of the project have received government and military awards for their contributions to natural language processing and mining information from big data.

Zhou could not be reached for comment.

The machine can be accessed from various online portals but are only open to registered users.

One English portal, pigai.org, requires a user to register either as a teacher or student and provide information, such as school name and class number, to verify their identity.

Users gave a similarly mixed response to the machines. While some said they were useful and more accurate than similar essay grading systems overseas, others described them as rubbish.

Some users have argued the software cannot distinguish between academic essays and other forms of writing.

One user on Zhihu, the largest question-and-answer website in China, posted a screenshot showing how the machine had assessed an April 2015 Washington Post comment piece “Why is Obama sticking it to stay-at-home moms?” as if it were answering an essay question.

The piece got a score of 71.5 out of 100 and the machine said that while the vocabulary used was “rich and appropriate” it was “slightly short for academic language”.

It concluded: “The flow can be improved on smoothness; and please improve the focus of the article; the paragraphs and sentences should be related to the topic.”


Zhu Xiaoyan, head of the state key laboratory of intelligent technology and systems at Tsinghua University, said human language AI technology has achieved significant progress in recent years.

She said some machines have written articles that went viral on social media, attracting more than 10 million views, but did not provide further details.

But Zhu said she had not heard of the essay-grading program adding that she would not use a machine to grade her students’ papers, adding: “It’s a human job.”

Yu Yafeng, professor at the institute of educational theories at Beijing Normal University, said computers could help grade candidates in subjects such as mathematics and physics because the answers were objective.

But essays can contain cultural, emotional or personal elements that a machine would not be able to gauge.

“There is no law forbidding AI from grading student essays, but this practice should raise ethical questions,” she said.

An eight-year-old primary school pupil in Chaoyang district, Beijing said he did not mind an AI machine checking his essays, pointing out that his teachers already used readily available technology to check the answers to basic maths questions.

“Our teachers are already using mobile phones to grade our maths homework,” he said.

“Take a photo and the score is out. What’s the difference to an essay?” — South China Morning Post
"
From facial recognition in the classroom to computers marking essays, China is wholeheartedly deploying new technologies into its education system(Credit: Screenshot SINA)
AI in schools: China’s massive and unprecedented education experiment
COMPUTERS
Rich Haridy
May 28th, 2018
In 2017, China revealed an ambitious masterplan to lead the world in both AI research and deployment by 2030. The roadmap not only looks to expand the country's research and development of AI technology, but to also find broad ways to implement its use across all sectors of society, from industry to urban planning. It has been revealed recently that several new technological innovations are now being tested in Chinese schools redefining how children can be educated in the 21st century. While the broader deployment of facial recognition software in the West is mired in controversy over concerns of accuracy and possible racial bias, China is leaping forward in public implementation with several recent stories highlighting how authorities are making use of the new technology. A recent report from a state-run media source has revealed a high school in Eastern China is testing a new facial recognition system designed to analyze the engagement of students in a class room, in real-time … for more, go to https://newatlas.com/china-ai-education-schools-facial-recognition/54786/ 

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