Daily Archives: March 8, 2017

Pocket! Algorithm lets confused robots ask questions

Robot disambiguation! Learning is all about asking questions.

A new algorithm lets robots ask for clarification when they’re not sure what a person wants. “Fetching objects is an important task that we want collaborative robots to be able to do,” says Stefanie Tellex, professor of computer science at Brown University.

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Favourite tweets! Not so favourite

I read this Jisc news item and it made me angry. It looks like  a classic piece of technological determinism – applying Learning Analytics to education to ‘improve’ retention and reduce administrative costs. Why not, if, as Jisc asserts, there’s ‘trouble’ with humans,

how good do we actually think people are?

And makes spurious comparisons,

How difficult is it to intervene with a student identified as at risk by a learning analytics processor? Is it harder than driving a car, which computers already do better than us?

At the moment I take issue with just about every sentence, but I want time to think and read about it. The article is certainly part of the discursive effort creating the conditions for Learning Analytics to become a reality.