Empowering Education through AI: One Step at a Time
Artificial Intelligence is empowering human lives on a daily basis. As companies and products become more automated, the impact of AI is being felt at every stage of the transformation process. Education, Healthcare, Financial services, news consumption and many more fields have been able to improve its operational efficiency and outreach through these advanced mechanisms. In the Covid era, one industry that has been badly hit is the education sector. As per UN reports, 1.37 billion students were impacted by the lockdown measures and the fear is that a lot of them may never come back to finish their courses. Here we will discuss some recent AI developments that will help kids in their learning process and make education way more accessible.
Data Annotation
Data annotation is the process of putting in metadata to the dataset. It is almost like tags, which can be added to text, images and video. These annotated data helps in building cleaner machine learning models with better audio-visual contents.
Types of annotation
Text
Natural Language Processing (NLP), an important segment of machine learning, improves its accuracy with upgraded text annotation. When you open websites today, your customer care is taken over by chatbots and virtual assistants. That is AI at your service directly! There are five major types of text annotations which include entity annotation, entity linking, text classification, sentiment annotation and linguistic annotation. These help in making the learning texts error free, analytical and provide a more comprehensive guide to students.
Audio
Here the main idea is to work on improving the speech, so that it is machine ready and becomes easier for users to say something and get quick answers correctly. This is also a part of the Natural Language processing and helps in better human to machine communication. Pronunciation, voice modulation and tone identification are the crucial part of this process. With greater technology, speech and transcriptions are becoming clearer, precise and accurate which will help kids in a great way. Specially for visually impaired kids, it is the only method they can study with and with time audio annotations are growing in simplifying the learning process.
Image
Face recognition technology is almost like a surveillance tool in the modern world. Your mobile, laptop and office entries are often done by facial recognition, for which machines need to be able to interpret images correctly. Although controversial in nature, image annotations are helping AI/ML to have a robotic vision which can understand objects and images better.
Video
Video annotations help machines recognize movements. As the name suggests, video consumption and uploads have been a prime factor in the fueling of online education. Not only learning, cooking, music, games, magic everything is visible today on YouTube and other social media platforms. With better suggestions, tags and alt tags, students are provided with similar kinds of video contents which are now being made with better graphics, design and content.
Education After Pandemic
The impact of COVID-19 has helped the growth of online learning. After the initial hiccups, tutors and students both have adjusted to this new situation. Learning apps have been trying to incorporate the real world feel, AI is playing the most important role here by improving the video lectures, audio, attractive graphics and automated answering by bots. As studies suggest, around 25-30% of students are taking online classes, which is expected to increase in the upcoming years. The number of AI/ML/Robotics/NLP companies are on the rise and by 2025, the global market is poised to touch $319.167 billion. In these situations, the market demands advancements in the learning portals so that students find it a bit comfortable in doing these classes.