ABOVE AVERAGE IS OVER:

A couple of years ago, Ashok Goel was overwhelmed by the number of questions his students were asking in his course on artificial intelligence.

Goel teaches computer science at Georgia Tech, sometimes to large classes, where students can ask thousands of questions online in a discussion forum.

With a limited number of teaching assistants, or TAs, many of those questions weren't getting answered in time. So, Goel came up with a plan: make an artificial intelligence "teaching assistant" that could help them out by answering students' frequently asked questions.

In 2015 he built Jill Watson, his AI TA -- named after one of the IBM founders, Thomas J. Watson.

Jill performed well that first year, alleviating the amount of work on Goel and his teaching assistants.

And, something else happened. Goel says using AI, in a course about AI, caught students by surprise, "They had been interacting with the TA all of this time, and you sort of assume that it's a human."

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