First AI + Education Summit is an international push for “AI literacy”

This summer, 350 participants came to MIT to explore a question that has so far outpaced any answers: How can education continue to provide opportunity for all when digital literacy is no longer enough—in a world where students now need to be fluent in artificial intelligence?

This AI + Education Summit he was the host With the RAISE initiative (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with speakers from the App Inventor Foundation, Mayor’s Office of the City of Boston, Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, and others. Highlights included an on-site hackathon, “Hack the Climate,” where teams of novice and experienced MIT App Inventor users had a day to develop an app to combat climate change.

In the opening remarksRAISE principal investigators Eric Klopfer, Hal Abelson, and Cynthia Breazeal highlighted the modern goals for AI proficiency. “Education is not just about learning facts,” Klopfer said. “Education is a whole development process. And we need to think about how to support teachers in being more effective. Teachers need to be part of the conversation about AI.” Abelson emphasized the aspect of computational empowerment, namely its direct impact, that “how is it different from the decades of people teaching about computers [is] what kids can do right now.” And Breazeal, director of the RAISE initiative, touched on AI-enhanced learning, including the need to use technology, such as robots that accompany students in the classroom, as something that is complementary to what students and teachers can do together, not as a replacement for each other. Or as Breazeal emphasized in her speech: “We really want people to understand, in a way that’s relevant, how AI works and how to design it responsibly. We want to make sure that people have an informed voice in how AI should be integrated into society. And we want to empower all people around the world to utilize AI, to utilize AI to solve significant problems in their communities.”

The summit included: invited winners With Global AI Hackathon. The awards were given to applications in two categories: climate and sustainability and health and well-being. The winning projects addressed issues such as sign language to sound translationmoving object detection for the visually impaired, empathy training using AI character interactions, and personal health checks using language images. Participants also took part in hands-on demonstrations of MIT App Inventor, a “playground” for Personal Robot Groupsocial robots; and a professional development session for teachers on responsible AI.

By bringing together people of such different ages, backgrounds, and geographies, the organizers were able to bring to the fore a unique mix of ideas that attendees could take home. Conference papers included real-world case studies of AI implementation in school settings, such as after-school clubs, considerations of student data security, and large-scale experiments in the UAE and India. And plenary speakers addressed AI funding in educationthe role of the state government in supporting its adoption and — in opening speech of the summit by Francesca Lazzeri, principal director of AI engineering and machine learning at Microsoft, the opportunities and challenges of using generative AI in education. Lazzeri discussed the development of toolkits that build safeguards around principles such as fairness, security, and transparency. “I really believe that learning generative AI is not just about computer science students,” Lazzeri said. “It’s about all of us.”

Pioneering AI Education from MIT

A key role in AI education is played by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, a long-time collaborator who helped implement MIT computational operation and project-based learning years before AI became a mainstream pedagogical challenge. Summit Panel discussed the history of his CoolThink projectwhich introduced it to grades 4-6 in 32 Hong Kong schools in an initial pilot, and then reached the ambitious goal of rolling it out to more than 200 Hong Kong schools. On the panel, CoolThink CEO Daniel Lai said the foundation, MIT, Education University of Hong Kong and City University of Hong Kong did not want to add to the burden of teachers and students with another curriculum outside of school. Instead, they wanted to “mainstream it in our education system so that every child has an equal opportunity to access these skills and knowledge.”

MIT has been working with CoolThink since its inception in 2016. Professor and App Inventor founder Hal Abelson helped Lai develop the project. Several summit participants and former MIT faculty members led the project’s development. Educational technologist Josh Sheldon led the MIT team’s work on the CoolThink curriculum and professional development for teachers. Karen Lang, then App Inventor’s manager of education and business development, was the lead curriculum developer for CoolThink’s early days, writing the lessons and accompanying tutorials and worksheets for three levels of the curriculum, with lend a hand from the Hong Kong education team. And Mike Tissenbaum, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led the development of the research design and theoretical foundation. Among other key roles, they led the initial teacher training for the first two cohorts of Hong Kong teachers, consisting of sessions totaling 40 hours with about 40 teachers each.

Ethical Requirements of Today’s “Distorting Mirror” of Artificial Intelligence

Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, he gave his final speechHe described the current state of AI as a “crooked mirror” that “distorts the world around us” and framed it as yet another technology that has created ethical demands for humans to find positive, empowering uses for it that complement our intelligence but also mitigate its risks.

“One of the areas that I’m personally most excited about,” Huttenlocher said, “is seeing people learn from AI,” and AI discovering solutions that people haven’t thought of on their own. As much of the summit showed, AI and education are something that need to happen in collaboration.[AI] It is not human intellect. It is not human judgment. It is something else.”