Students completing an online course at the Georgia Institute of Technology were recently surprised to discover that one of their nine teaching assistants was a computer, reports The Wall Street Journal. The TA, known to students as Ms. Watson, was powered by IBM’s Watson analytics system and was capable of both posing and responding to questions on the course’s online forum. Georgia Tech Computer Science Professor Ashok Goel says that one of the computer TA’s main purposes is to answer routine, information-based questions that often “bog down” human TAs. Goel adds that the current goal is to have Ms. Watson answer up to 40% of the more than 10,000 messages that online students ask his TAs each semester, which will hopefully free up the human TAs to address more substantive questions on course material.
Wall Street Journal