The increase in online education has allowed a new type of teacher to emerge—an artificial one. But just how accepting students are of an artificial instructor remains to be seen. That’s why researchers at the University of Central Florida’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media are working to examine student perceptions of AI-based teachers. Some of their findings, published recently in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, indicate that for students to accept an AI teaching assistant, it needs to be effective and easy to talk to.

According to Jihyun Kim, the lead author of the study, the hope is that by understanding how students relate to Al-teachers, engineers and computer scientists can design them to easily integrate into the education experience.

“To use machine teachers effectively, we need to understand students’ views on machine teachers, their learning experiences with them and more,” Kim says. “This line of research is needed to design effective machine teachers that can actually facilitate positive learning experiences.”

AI teaching assistants can help ease a teacher's workload, such as by responding to commonly asked questions by students. These questions, which often appear each semester and become numerous in online classes with hundreds of students, can become a large task for a teacher. The quick delivery of answers also helps students.

An example of an AI teaching assistant is one named Jill Watson that was created by a researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Jill was fed the thousands of questions and answers commonly asked in the researcher’s online class that he’d taught over the years. With some additional learning and adjustments, Jill was eventually able to answer the students’ commonly asked questions accurately without any human assistance as if she was one of the researcher’s human teaching assistants.

“I hope our research findings help us find an effective way to incorporate AI agents into education,” Kim says. “By adopting an AI agent as an assistant for a simple and repetitive task, teachers would be able to have more things scheduled such as meeting with students and developing teaching strategies.”

Most of us have looked up at the stars that fill the night sky and wondered whether we’re alone in the universe. Indeed, the question of whether there’ s life out there has been something humankind ’s been asking itself for countless years. But thanks to China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the answer to this question may come a lot sooner than we expected.

The telescope has a huge round reflector, which measures 500 meters across and has a perimeter（周长）of 1.6 kilometers. Because of its great size, it would have been both difficult and inefficient to get FAST to move like a regular telescope. Instead, FAST’s designers came up with a great solution: its surface is made up of 4450 panels which can be individually adjusted. This clever design feature allows scientists to detect radio signals from any angle with a great degree of accuracy. “Panels can change their positions through connected wires and parallel （关联的） robots. We can control their position with an accuracy of 1 mm,” Zheng Yuanpeng, chief engineer of the telescope’s panel project, told Xinhua News Agency.

FAST’s engineers also had the task of finding a suitable location. As any interference would affect its ability to detect distant radio waves, it needed to be built in a remote area. Luckily, the perfect spot was found in the beautiful mountains of Guizhou Province. “There are three hills about 500 meters away from one another, creating a valley that is perfect to support the telescope," Sun Caihong, chief engineer of FAST’ s construction, told Xinhua.

And although it wasn’t yet fully operated, FAST had already made great discoveries by October 2017. Since 1967, only around 2000 pulsars （脉冲星） have been discovered, yet FAST had detected six more by October 2017. Once FAST is fully up and running, we may finally have the answer to one of the biggest questions in history.

Electricity has started flowing from the Hornsea 2 wind farm, which will become the world’s largest offshore wind farm when it is complete. Located in the ocean off the UK’s east coast, it is unlikely to hold the title long, however. The expansion of onshore wind has flattened out, but offshore is in the rapid growth phase,and some huge projects are under development and consideration.

When complete, Hornsea 2 will consist of 165 wind turbines (涡轮机), each with a peak capacity of 8 MW. At 1,320 MW, Hornsea 2 will take the title of world’s largest from the neighboring Homsea 1, which has smaller but more numerous turbines, for a total capacity of 1,218 MW.

The project came in the fortuitous-timing. The possibility that limitations in gas supply and a cold winter could seriously disturb electricity networks in the UK, causing anxiety for months. Even a small part of Hornsea’s eventual production will help reduce that danger. On its first morning, it contributed to almost 50 percent of Britain’s electricity.

Meanwhile, the development coincides (类似) with China’s largest offshore wind farm, Jiangsu Qidong, which reached full operation a day later. At a total of 802 MW, Jiangsu Qidong is behind either Hornsea stage, but it is twice the size of the existing offshore wind farm outside Europe. North American wind farms usually standardize with a single size of turbine, but Jiangsu Qidong uses seven models.

Neither Hornsea nor Jiangsu Qidong compares to the giant wind farms being developed by Denmark and South Korea,and the more potential giant off Iceland. Even before those come to fruition, Hornsea’s third stage—with 2,400 MW soon to start construction—will leave them well behind.

Even with operations beginning at these wind farms,offshore wind accounts for less than 10 percent of global wind production. It’s also currently more expensive. However, prices are falling faster for offshore, as turbines get larger and experience grows. It is anticipated that the next round of UK wind farms, instead of requiring subsidies (补贴), will return money to the public.