Last Week in AI #27

AI in Schools Proven to Improve Students’ Performance

Several artificial intelligence tools being used by teachers at schools in the US have shown to significantly improve students’ school performance. One of these tools, Bakpax, can read students’ handwriting and automatically grade assignments. Teachers claim class engagement is much improved and goes to show how future classrooms will be shaped by tech.

Read more at:The New York Times

You Can Now Choose Topic or Sentiment for AI Text Prediction

Text generation models like GPT-2 have recently been the center of attention due to their capacity to generate convincing pieces of text. However, it wasn’t possible to control the context of the generated text. Researchers at Uber AI developed a way to steer these language models towards a particular topic like, for example, politics.

Read more at: MIT Tech Review

AI to Identify Unknown Civil War Soldiers

Facial recognition technology is being used to obtain the identities of Civil War soldiers whose pictures were taken in uniform but information linking to who they were was lost. Photos of soldiers are uploaded by users to a website to see if they match the facial features of other identified photos in the database. There have been over 3,000 identifications made.

Read more at: TIME