The Promise of Artificial Intelligence

In a remote African hut, a mother clutches her collapsed child in dread. She’s seen the symptoms before. They’re almost always fatal.

She describes them aloud in her native tongue. Across the room, a computer screen displays the face of her “pediatrician.” He asks her a series of questions and then prescribes the cure.

It’s water.

Today, Africa has the highest mortality rate for children under five. Most times, death is from preventable problems like dehydration. But medical help is seldom close enough to matter.

A proposal before the World Bank would change that by placing cognitive tutors in every hut of every village on the African continent.

That’s the long-term dream of Carnegie Mellon’s Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics Raj Reddy, who like the late visionary Herb Simon, believes education technology can cure many of the world’s ills. With the help of World Bank funding, Reddy hopes to deliver on this promise for $1 per dwelling.

But, in the near term, cognitive tutors are helping underprivileged children learn math three times faster and perform much better on tests. Intelligent tutors are now in 4 percent of the nation’s schools and attracting wide interest among government agencies.

In fact, the U.S. Department of Education granted Carnegie Mellon $1.4 million to test a Web-based tutor for middle school students taking standardized exams required by the federal "No Child Left Behind Act,” which commands public schools to demonstrate yearly improvement as measured by students’ standardized test scores. The tutor tailors instruction to meet the specialized needs of each student, provides actionable feedback to teachers and even predicts a student’s test score.

The Assistment System, as it’s called, draws upon the proven success of Carnegie Mellon’s popular Cognitive Tutor®, a comprehensive secondary mathematics curricula and computer-based tutoring program developed by John R. Anderson, the Richard King Mellon University Professor of Psychology and Computer Science. The Cognitive Tutor® has been commended by the Education Department and is in use in 1,500 schools nationwide.

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