Artificial intelligence or AI is called artificial for a good reason. Facebook made that point last week by ending its attempt to rely heavily on software algorithms to select news items for its 2 billion users.

It announced on Jan.19 that the Facebook community will be asked to rank news outlets by their trustworthiness. “This reader feedback will promote high quality news that helps build a sense of common ground in a world with so much division”, said chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

The first surveys have started in the United States and will soon expand to other countries. The company plans to include the local news outlets of users in its surveys. Like many digital platforms that act as news providers, Facebook had great faith in a belief that programmed electrons in computer servers can discern qualities of thought such as trust, fairness and honesty. Even in respected newsrooms, however, these traits of character require constant upkeep among journalists and feedback from paying customers. Good judgment on news relies on orders of consciousness beyond what a machine can do.

Rather than move toward becoming a hands-on gatekeeper of news, Facebook now hopes its “diverse and representative” sampling of users can lead to a ranking of news outlets and that would bring a measure of objectivity in its news feed. The company may be in the news business, but it has chosen to outsource news credibility to the collective wisdom of individuals and their ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. By placing its trust in people as seekers of truth, Facebook could earn greater trust from its users. This is also a lesson for many companies especially digital platforms or those in the media business.

According to the latest survey of trust in institutions worldwide by Edelman communications firm, “media has become the least-trusted institution for the first time more so than other businesses or government”. “In particular, the US is enduring an unprecedented crisis of trust among many of. its institutions”, says Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman. “The root cause of this fall is the lack of objective facts and rational discourse”, he adds. Facebook’s shift away from computer-driven news selection is a welcome step toward restoring trust in the overall business of news. This is not a new problem. “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper”, wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1807. Yet the Digital Age has forced the issue of trust for news providers. By inviting readers to participate in solving this problem, Facebook has itself set a new bar for earning trust.

Five years is a rather short time in the long history of China. 【小题1】. Do you still remember the mobile phone you used five years ago? The answer for most people is definitely not. Technology has gone so far that many things which seemed impossible yesterday have now come into reality. And so many benefits have been brought to our life.

【小题2】. Nowadays, it’s normal for people to communicate on WeChat, the most popular mobile social media platform in China. People carry less cash with them because most of the stores and hotels accept WeChat Pay and AliPay. The emergence of sharing vehicles helps reduce time on transportation. More people are using online shopping, which in turn helps the express delivery industry. What’s more, the wide availability of bullet trains helps people’s travel and provides higher-quality services. And people can easily buy train and flight tickets on different apps without having to wait in lines to buy tickets 【小题3】.

But has it occurred to you that just five years ago all these things were beyond people’s imagination?【小题4】. Unlike today, when we have access to wide-range of news on mobile devices, there were limited news sources five years ago.【小题5】.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, has slowly begun to influence higher education around the world. Now, one new AI tool could change the way university students evaluate their professor. The tool is called Hubert, a teacher evaluation tool that appears as an AI-powered chatbot. Instead of filling out a form, students use a chat window to give feedback (反馈) on the course and their professor. Afterwards, Hubert categorizes the students’ comments for the professor to review.

Hubert is free for educators to use. More than 600 teachers have used it already. The goal of the new Hubert program is to improve education by giving teachers detailed, organized feedback from students.

Viktor Nordmark, from Sweden, started the company in 2015, with several friends. Before creating Hubert, the founders asked teachers what would improve their teaching skills. The answer, Nordmark said, was qualitative (定性的) feedback from their students. In other words, teachers wanted students to write detailed answers to open-ended questions about their experiences in class.

Qualitative feedback is different from the survey responses, which students are often asked to provide at the end of a class. “This kind of data takes a lot of time for professors to collect and analyze,” Nordmark said. And for the students, it can also be “really boring to fill out.” So Nordmark and his friends designed Hubert as a compromise between a traditional survey and a personal interview. “You can reach a really large crowd, but you can also get really qualitative data back,” Nordmark said.

Now, when Hubert receives comments from students, it compares them with the information already in its system to organize the data. Nordmark says that Hubert will continue to get smarter as it receives more comments in the future. Nordmark says he and his co-founders have plans to make Hubert more flexible and accurate. They hope to give teachers the possibility of selecting their own evaluation questions.