John McCarthy, father of Artificial Intelligence, our future ....

 John McCarthy, 1927-2011, the father of Artificial Intelligence did his BS from Caltech, PhD from Princeton and worked mostly in Stanford University. He was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist.

He along with others, coined the term “Artificial Intelligence,” and invented the first programming language for symbolic computation, LISP (which is still used as a preferred language in the field of AI), and invented and established time-sharing. His main research in the field involved the formalization of commonsense knowledge.

Simon, McCarthy, Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude E. Shannon coined the term "artificial intelligence" in a proposal that they wrote for the famous Dartmouth conference in Summer 1956. This conference started AI as a field.

While AI has been improving, the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT has been a game changer. ChatGPT is a conversational application of GPT-3, the most powerful AI system in the world, allowing you to have a natural conversation with this powerful technology.

Can AI plan an invasion and take over the world? Absolutely not. AI cannot have a vision or purpose on its own except someone designs it that way. It cannot design itself that way (through deep learning) because deep learning is to improve the efficiency of what the AI was designed for. Humans are territorial in nature, meaning we like to feel in control in order to feel safe. If something is unknown to us, and therefore outside of our control, like AI, then we fear it.

How can I not be left behind in the modern era of AI ? Learning the relevant programming languages and tools will be beneficial. Python is the most popular programming language for AI, it's one of the hottest languages going around, and it's also easy to learn! Python is an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language with dynamic semantics.

Existential risk from artificial general intelligence is the hypothesis that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) could result in human extinction or some other unrecoverable global catastrophe.

AI will never replace human intuition (click here for Forbes aricle)    

Late Stephen Hawking, however had a different point on AI and its impact on humanity. 

Impact of AI on humanity :

74 year old theoretical physicist, late Stephen Hawking, author of the classic, "A Brief History of Time", Professor and Director of Research at Centre for Cosmology at University of Cambridge has highlighted three catastrophies to befall planet earth in the next one hundred years and finish off human domination.

First catastrophe is the proliferation of artificial intelligence robotics. Imagine a world where humans would be coexisting with AI robots in the era of general AI. Imagine the disaster that would befall humanity then.

In Hawking's own words, "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete (with these self-proliferating machines) and would be superseded". Artificial intelligence powered autonomous weapons like "autonomous armed quadcopters" could be a big threat to humanity.

Second catastrophe as Prof Hawking predicts is the arrival of aliens from outer planets. Either they come with better intelligence and better weapons and technology to conquer mankind and see its elimination or are less intelligent and hence not much of a threat, would depend on how well we are prepared to meet such an eventuality.

The third catastrophe to befall planet earth in the next hundred years is the uncontrolled proliferation of atomic weapons resulting in a global war which will ensure the end of life on planet earth.

Prof. Hawking also talks of global warming  and genetically mutated viruses as the other two imminent and dangerous threats staring at mankind, if we do not come out with a global concerted action plan to combat these threats facing mankind as a whole. Click here for the BBC interview with Prof. Hawking on these threats..

Let us hope the potential of AI is harnessed effectively in the right direction and measure so that AI instead of spelling the doom for mankind will be beneficial in the long run.

George

Artificial Intelligence and Amara's Law ..

In the continued experience of technology and the challenges, we have come across one more law, it is Amara’s Law (named after the scientist and futurist Roy Charles Amara (1925-2007)):

Amara's law sates that,

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it's effect in the long run.

In the short run, humans tend to overestimate the impact of technologies, we tell great things about technologies, what it can accomplish and so on. The technology takes time to be assimilated among the population and the growth is really incremental in the initial stages. But in the long run, all the small deltas (increments) get added up and the impact is really great.

In the graph below, we plot time on the X axis and the impact of the modern technologies on the Y axis. (Image credit Shubham Vyas, IIT Guwahati)

As an example, when Internet got introduced in the commercial world in the late 90s, we predicted the great impact it would have on humanity but we saw the great dotcom bust and our short term dreams all went bust by 2004. But not losing heart, the Internet usage and applications got wider and wider acceptance and we see in just 25 years, it is penetrated all aspects of human life, from health, finance, commerce, education, news, banking , what not .. !!

Similarly we understand that the new technologies of AI, Virtual Reality and Autonomous Vehicles are benefiting humanity in increments presently, as it is in the evolutionary stage, but in the long run will provide revolutionary benefits. It will change the way we interact and deal with each other, with nature, our environment, our surroundings and with machines.

The impact of AI technologies on humanity will be profound in the long run ..

That day is not far at all, maybe in the next 20 years ..

George ..

Why MOODLE LMS is the best ..

Why MOODLE is the best LMS in the world ? 

(the text was compiled by Google AI, the blog owner, except for very minor tweaking, helped by putting the points in logical order)

Moodle is the most popular Learning Management System (LMS) in the world. Moodle has been adopted by universities, schools, and organizations from all corners of the planet. At the core of Moodle is a simple philosophy – to provide educators with the best tools for delivering online education.

Moodle is the world's most widely used LMS system. It's an open-source framework used for all kinds of eLearning, including blended learning, distance education and workplace training.

Moodle based LMS enjoys popularity with all types and sizes of organizations, mainly because it is configurable, highly-flexible and feature-rich. The fact that it is open source implies that it is open to scrutiny, and developers from all over the world can access and modify the codes and make it more secure. One of the many benefits of using a Moodle site is that it can be accessed from anywhere via PC, tablet or other mobile devices via a web-browser or through a free mobile app.

With automatic updates to the latest Moodle release, MoodleCloud hosting seamlessly gives educators the choice to adopt the open source learning platform for their teaching and training objectives without the need to install, maintain and upgrade software and servers themselves. There is no need of a MOODLE server. 

 For first time users, MoodleCloud is the often trusted solution for hosting. One of the reasons for this is the fact that MoodleCloud is Moodle's very own hosting solution. While Moodle™ is completely free of cost and available to download for any kind of website, Moodle™Cloud is a freemium solution. With MoodleCloud free plan, you get to create unlimited courses for up to 50 users and 250 MB of storage. 

Of all MOODLE applications globally, higher education uses 15% of all MOODLE installation, the rest 85% of global installations covering online education, IT cos., hospitals, government etc.. (click here for a detailed article on MOODLE users globally)

 The most trusted learning management system for higher education. With Moodle LMS, you can create a flexible and accessible online learning environment helping you save time and better support your students throughout their academic journey. Moodle is used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom and other online learning projects in schools, universities, workplaces and other sectors. Moodle is used to create custom websites with online courses and allows for community-sourced plugins. That explains why MOODLE uses in higher education is just 15% of all MOODLE installations world wide. 

Blackboard prioritizes providing better assessment tools for teachers, while Moodle focuses more on learners' engagement tools. 

Top universities of the world like Oxford and Cambridge use a combination of LMS including MOODLE, while Harvard uses CANVAS LMS, but has MOODLE integration possible. The Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) catalog can be integrated into the Moodle LMS platform, which allows for simple tool integration and unlimited access to HBP course materials for students, instructors, and course administrators.

The main difference between Canvas and Moodle can be observed in content creation. Moodle offers content authoring tools while canvas on the other hand fails to do so. Moodle is free and allows the user to make changes to fit their learning.

 Moodle has a very robust logging system that tracks every time a user visits a page or clicks a link. It records when files are uploaded, when quizzes are taken, when students log in, and even when students view an item.

The Moodle Proctoring tool is for MCQ (Quiz) assessments only and captures your picture via webcam to identify who is attempting the MCQ (Quiz) assessment. It will capture your picture and screenshot automatically every 30 seconds and store it as a PNG image.

Moodle is ahead of the curve when it comes to detecting and preventing cheating. One way that Moodle can help a teacher prevent cheating is by providing additional statistics about each student's performance, such as how long they spent on each question. 

Moodle is open source or free software (GPL). It is written in PHP. It will run on most common web servers, on common platforms. It requires a database, and will work with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle. 

 

Moodle software has the power to streamline training processes for the best learning experiences and proves itself invaluable when it comes to structuring and sharing course materials with learners, and also in monitoring and assessing progress. Moodle Partners give financial support, contribute code, coordinate major projects and grow Moodle's userbase in exchange for being part of an exclusive group of official partners allowed to hock Moodle related products and services.

 

Moodle does not require programming skills 

Moodle learning analytics supports two types of models.

• Machine-learning based models, including predictive models, make use of AI models trained using site history to detect or predict hidden aspects of the learning process.
• "Static" models use a simpler, rule-based system of detecting circumstances on the Moodle site and notifying selected users.

Artificial intelligence is one radical approach that allows the personalized experience of many teachers and tutors. Artificial intelligence helps to discover what a student does and doesn't know and creates a customized curriculum for each learner, given the gaps in knowledge. "An AI-based eLearning platform is a machine/system that possesses the ability to perform different tasks requiring human intelligence. It has the ability to offer solutions to human-related problems, like speech recognition, translations, decision making, and much more."

Let me stress it again .. MOODLE is a FREE and OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE (FOSS) .. one can scale it to include any number of courses, to any number of students and for any amount of time. Unlike proprietary offerings like Blackboard, Moodle developers are working for societal good, really trying to push the frontiers of learning and knowledge around the world so that no one is denied an opportunity to study .. 

The final benefit of using an LMS that is driven by one of the largest open source teams in the world is that there are an endless amount of learning resources. Within Moodle’s Community Forums, you have the ability to connect with other Moodle users and find answers to your questions. With 144 million forum posts and 72 million Moodle learning resources, there is seldom a Moodle question left unanswered!

With over 500 Moodle plugins developed by the global community,(AI is just one of them) learners, managers, and administrators have the opportunity to flourish in an environment that makes learning collaborative, engaging, and fun. 

Alliance University Bangalore India has been using MOODLE for the past ten years and has courses in blended learning mode across the different schools of the University. Click here to have a look.

George Easaw 

 

AI, for the common man ..

In the next 10-20 years we can expect Machine Learning and narrow AI to dominate AI applications, which is learning from past experience and using that data to predict the future for specific applications. The more data we use, the more accurate the results will be.

Machine Learning, an important subset of AI is different from conventional approach. Instead of creating software that has a specific outcome, science of writing programming, (conventional approach), machine learning helps machines to understand from loads and loads of data and learns from examples fed to it. This is the future of narrow AI for the next 20-30 years in our lifetime. 🙂

What constitutes modern day innovation ?

Chris Howard, Head of Research at Gartner tells us in this latest 2022 HBR article Innovating in uncertain times (click here) that it is 

1. keeping an innovative mindset, 

2. retaining key employee talent

3. focusing on cyber security, 

4. addressing global climate crisis through environmental sustainability initiatives

5. investments in emerging technologies and

6. focusing on technology adoption

These are the points that organisations need to focus to bring an innovative mindset in the organisations and help tech managers through these uncertain modern times.. 👍🙂

Finding ways to dispose used tyres

Tyres do not biodegrade. But they are 100% recyclable.

This picture is from the outskirts of Kuwait city showing an old tyre grave with 20 year old used discarded tyres lying in the open.

The above statement is a very strong statement that tells about the potential of tyres to damage the environment and at the same time to be of use to society. The fact is even after 500 years, tyres do not biodegrade but they break down into small and small parts that never degrade. They get spread or distributed in the environment that results in grave damage to planet earth. 

An interesting article from Harvard Business Review '21 (click here) tackles this issue in depth. Tyres along with all plastics, smart phones, computer hardware etc. fall in the bottom right quadrant of the Circularity matrix (easy to access and hard to process). 

Design for Recycling (as these parts cannot be reused) to retrieve valuable parts, recover rubber for road construction and concrete, process to retrieve biofuels, retrieve steel wires and other precious metals is presently according to research, the best way to recycle tyres. 

The other circularity strategies of Retain Product Ownership and Product Life Extension will not work for these products

It is high time used rubber tyres start getting recycled as fuel in furnaces of cement and iron and steel companies (already happening) and society finds useful ways of disposing old tyres. Rubberised roads where old tyres are mixed with bitumen to give strength and durability to tarred roads is one useful way. Studies have shown that finely shredded used tyres can be mixed with cement in concrete to give strength and durability to concrete.

Will humanity find an innovative way to process these used tyres to benefit humanity through the Circularity route ? As one of my friends suggested, if we can restrict the personal transportation sector by offering better public transport, this menace can be nipped in the bud itself as car tyres take up a high percentage of global tyre sales,  almost 60%. These days tyre wear particle pollution in the atmosphere is more deadly than vehicle exhaust pollution. 

2.4 billion tyres were manufactured globally in 2022 (49% in China followed by US, EU and India) and is expected to grow to 2.8 billion by 2028. Click here for a purchasable report of global tyre industry.

George 

Twenty sessions, twenty two quizzes, human-AI collaboration, power of AI.

We have all the time been hearing, and indeed have a lingering fear in the back of our heads of how AI can replace humans and how it could be a threat to humanity in the long run. But carrying out an instance of an effective case of human-AI classroom collaboration, this impression is getting a changeover.

Human-AI collaboration is the study of how humans and artificial intelligence agents work together to accomplish a shared goal. AI systems can aid humans in everything from decision making tasks to art creation. -wikipedia

Human-AI symbiosis means interactions between humans and AI can make both parties smarter over time - H. Jarrahi

Here we explain a case of human-AI collaboration which is maturing into case of human AI symbiosis.

An AI depiction of Alliance University

A very practical case of human AI collaboration has happened in the MBA sem 3 Operations classroom in Alliance University Bangalore, India from August 2022- Dec 2022 when in the MBA third semester subject of Operations Strategy and Environmental Sustainability,  in about 20 sessions, the 46 students had the benefit of taking 22 quizzes, ie. at the rate of 1.1 quiz for every classroom session, besides four internet based multimedia quizzes too. The benefits this has brought to the student community is being assessed. 

 

In a 2020 study (click here) conducted at the Iowa state University in US it was found that the students who were quizzed at least once a week tend to do better in their understanding and grades than those who were not. The AI intervention in this case was not in the quiz administration but in the help offered by Google AI that helped the faculty member to prepare the high quality  quizes with the help of AI resources.

The multiple quizzes which were administered almost on a daily basis would not have been possible but for the big help offered by the Free and Open Source software MOODLE, the Learning Management System (LMS software) in Alliance University, Bangalore, to a very large extent Google AI and the Google cloud.

In quick feedback taken from students, they were positive at being able to assess for themselves their own understanding of the concepts, get almost daily and weekly feedback on their improved awareness of subject fundamentals to help improve their performance in the subject. Final exams are almost a fortnight away, student performance at that would highlight the real benefit of AI in aiding and improving student academic achievements, understanding and grades.

Google Decision Tree AI algorithms aided in preparing questions that  accessed the extremes of human ingenuity, understanding and comprehension in each subject area, which was otherwise impractical and out of reach of human intelligence and perseverance. Entire case studies were also prepared courtesy Google AI.

Looking forward eagerly to complete this Human-AI collaboration classroom exercise this semester and analyse the results in depth over the coming weeks and see this mature into a human AI symbiosis exercise soon. This would result in spanning out further  human-AI collaboration classroom exercises for other courses and get a comprehensive outcome, promising or otherwise, that could further push the boundaries of student understanding, grip and mastery over a subject domain and help the student community the world over.

George 

SDG report 2022, insights ..

The 500 page SDG report 2022 published by Cambridge Press, edited by Jeffrey Sachs et al (click here) makes interesting reading as to how the 2015 SDG makes sense to the world seven years after it was propounded to save the planet earth. 

We have barely another eight years to see all the 17 SDGs blosom into positive results for planet earth and its inhabitants.

While I am satisfied with the rankings in general, it is very fortunate that we have neglected our co inhabitants on planet earth. 

In a study by OECD (click here), while human issues and problems get top priority, consideration for all life on land, (SDG 15) flora and fauna is only at rank 15 and all life below water (SDG 14) is given the last rank 17.

Isin't it not high time we took all flora and fauna, on land and below water with us in our fight to protect the planet ?

Alliance University is contributing in no less way in ensuring Quality Education (SDG 4) and reducing inequalities (SDG 10), but our lookout is how we can ensure that all other people of the world are made aware of these SDGs and work towards fulfilling the goals by 2030. 

By keeping the campus green (SDG 13) and with an effective water treatment (SDG 12) system in place, Alliance University can state with great pride an confidence that we are fully supporting the United Nations in its aim to conserve the environment.

George..