Professor Ashok Goel of Georgia Tech developed an artificially intelligent teaching assistant to help handle the enormous number of student questions in the online class, Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence. Professor Goel already had eight teaching assistants, but that wasn’t enough to deal with the overwhelming number of daily questions from students.

Many students drop out of online courses because of the lack of teaching support. When students feel ignored or confused and reach out with questions that go unanswered, their motivation to continue begins to taper off. Professor Goel decided to do something to improve this situation and his solution was to create a virtual assistant named Jill Watson.

Goel and his team developed several versions of Jill Watson before releasing her to the online forums. At first, the virtual assistant wasn’t too great. But Goel and his team sourced the online discussion forum to find all the 40,000 questions that had ever been asked since the class was launched. Then they began to feed Jill with the questions and answers. After some adjustments and sufficient time, Jill was able to answer the students’ questions correctly 97% of the time. The virtual assistant became so advanced and realistic that the students didn’t know she was a computer. The students, who were studying artificial intelligence, were interacting with the virtual assistant and couldn’t tell it apart from a real human being. Goel didn’t inform them about Jill’s true identity until April 26. The students were actually very positive about the experience.

The goal of Professor Goel’s virtual assistant next year is to take over answering 40% of all the questions posed by students on the online forum. Professor Goel has a much rosier outlook on the future of artificial intelligence.

The United States Postal Service(LISPS)is offering a way to people who are interested in seeing tomorrow’s mail today．The postal service will send consumers images(图像)of their letters，magazines and other mail before they arrive．The new service is called Informed Delivery．It is an attempt to remain competitive in an ever—changing world．

Postal service officials say the increased use of email，digital messaging services and social media has made it difficult to stay relevant．David Rupert is a media relations specialist who spoke about the competition the agency now faces．Whether you turn on a television or your computer，or people come to your door with different products and services，all of those are competing for consumers’time and energy，he said．

Interested users are first required to sign up for Informed Delivery．Once registered，the consumer receives a daily email with virtual(虚拟)images of letters or other things to be delivered．The US Postal Service says it can especially help those who have a mailbox at their local post office，so they know when to get their mail：

Another postal offering is a service that seeks to make advertising-related mail-often called junk mail—more fun．The service uses virtual and augmented reality(虚拟现实和增强现实)to let consumers interact with their junk mail．Many companies put special coding on their advertising，which can give users an interactive experience．Some companies even put virtual reality eyeglasses in the mail to make their ads come to life．Consumers have mixed reactions to virtual and augmented reality advertising．“You can find some good things within junk mail．It is a good idea．We’11 see how it works，”Postal service user Victor Teah said．But Jocelyn Coatney doesn’t think it would change her mind about junk mail．“For some，that might be fun．But for me，it would be useless，”she said．

The problem with students using Google is not that the search leader is unable to offer useful educational content. It’s that finding that content using simple search terms is a difficult art to master. But some educational companies and organizations aim to make it easier to find useful educational content among the Web. They are forming a working group to come up with more detailed criteria(标准)that could eventually be added into the search lines for Google, Bing, and Yahoo !

The project was encouraged by a joint move by those major search engines to help users do more effective Web­searches. The idea behind the new education corporation is to determine a common “framework” for narrowing search results for education content—by subject area, or source type, or content type, or any number of possible criteria. The goal is also to persuade publishers of educational content to use a matching set of tags(分类)to help the search engines sort out their content more easily.

Search engines are used by college students, but they were not designed for them. This has been a subject of much   handwringing (绝望) among professors, who worry that students are not finding the most reliable content on the Internet even if more and more content providers of good fame—textbook publishers, scholars, universities and many others—have been putting useful academic resources on the open Web.

Michael Johnson, a member who will be serving on a working group devoted to developing the framework over the next six months or so, said “The project is aimed at benefiting the   publishers   of   educational   content   as   much   as students. ”