The artificial-intelligence approach to teaching English in rural India

Artificial Intelligence is drawing a lot of interest from corporates, start-ups and the government because of its potential for business and social transformation. Indian AI sector has seen 18% YoY growth in 2018 and NITI Aayog has also identified five prioritysectors— health, education, agriculture, smart cities and smart mobility in its research paper on National AI Strategy.

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Globally, the total economic value derived from AI is predicted to reach USD 3.9 Trillion by 2022. Hence, this is the right time for innovation in AI-based applications for improving the quality of life of rural population of India, especially in primary sectors. TEACHER SHORTAGE Indian village schools suffer from persistent shortage of qualified teachers. Globally, there is a need for 24.4 million primary school teachers to achieve UNESCO’s goal of universal primary education by 2030. In India, although the overall pupilteacher ratio (PTR) has been improving gradually, most of the teachers in rural areas lack proper training.

This is further aggravated by the fact that India has nearly 100,000 schools, mostly in villages, which are single-teacher schools. This impacts PTR negatively and leads to deterioration of learning experience of the students eventually affecting their motivation to attend classes regularly. Under these circumstances, teaching of all subjects, including English, has suffered a lot across schools in villages. This vacuum in rudimentary education is very difficult to fill using skill-based trainings done later. Unless this conundrum is resolved, ensuring employability of a huge segment of population, is going to be a persistent challenge. Hence, there is an urgent need to augment the teaching community at village schools using digital technologies as well as AI . LANGUAGE TEACHING English has emerged as universally accepted “lingua-franca” globally as well as across India. But various surveys have revealed the state of English language skills of Indian students. Especially, among rural students, the situation is worse, and it affects their employability in various customer facing roles across industries. Teaching of English can benefit from various capabilities of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) technique of AI to make it more effective. On one hand, it helps the students to pick up right skills at right pace, and on the other hand, it exposes teachers to emerging digital technologies. WRITING SKILLS Various NLP-based techniques, generated using (machine learning) ML and word processing, can be used to automate the process of teaching writing English to students. For example, automatic detection of incorrect spellings/punctuations, grammatically incorrect phrases or sentences, generating reward points for correctly formed sentences and such. The process can be made more engaging by starting with partially filled paragraph templates on chosen topics, where students work on correctly guessing and filling the blanks by adding words, phrases, sentences appropriately. Another advanced technique namely, words/phrase prediction on partially constructed sentences can help students to fill the gaps/void which they face while writing a paragraph on some topic. Such a model of Automated Assisted Learning (AAL) enables more experimentation, innovative thinking. Even for translation, the process that is a part of a student understanding the subjects, there are NLP models trained on language translation, which includes the relevant dictionary mapping (e.g. Hindi->English). SPEAKING AND READING For most Indian children, spoken English practice follows learning of writing skills. It is also true that many students who acquire good writing skill, still fear speaking in English, which is perceived as essential skill by employers. One way to help young people to come out of this is to engage them in regular English conversation. A chatbot, like Google Personal Assistant, trained on topic-based conversation can really help students to learn speaking English. To start with, the student can try pronouncing individual words correctly (by listening to pronunciation of the chatbot), followed by speaking individual phrases and complete sentences.

As availability of appropriate corpus is an important pre-requisite of building such a learning application, initially such a model can be targeted for teaching English to students speaking most common languages, such as Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi or Tamil.

Source: Hindustan Times dated 27 March, 2019

‘I always want to master whatever people call impossible’

A relaxed Michael Phelps looked at the Times Sport page, saw the previous night’s IPL report, and chuckled. “Cricket? Doesn’t that take, like, 10 days to get over?”

He was only joking, of course, but we explained there were three formats, and that this was the ultra-shortened version. He seemed to like the idea, especially an analogy which cropped up about fine wine co-existing with the cheaper variety on the shelves, but still couldn’t stop guffawing about a game taking days to get over!

Phelps’ swimming career, after all, was all about short, sharp bursts of sustained physical, tactical and technical excellence. It was all about extending the will and soaring above the bounds of the possible, something he did better, and more often, than most other sportspersons in history.

The most decorated Olympian of all time, with 28 medals, 23 of them gold, Phelps is that rarest of rare species — a sporting genius. As we found out, though, he can also be remarkably human. Here as brand ambassador for apparel company Under Armour, Phelps is still easing into his various post-career roles, and still staving off the keen urge to compete. Most importantly, Phelps the superstar is learning to coexist with Michael the ordinary family man. 

To read the full interview, please visit https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/i-always-want-to-master-whatever-people-call-impossible-michael-phelps/articleshow/68590185.cms

(Accessed on 27 March, 2019)

30 years of surfing the giant web

Source: The Times of India dated 27 March, 2019

AICTE to introduce students feedback-based assessment for the promotion of Engineering teachers

Besides research work and their overall performance, teachers in Engineering colleges will now be appraised on the basis of students' evaluation All India Council of Technical Education's (AICTE) decision to include the students' feedback to assess the teachers has been introduced to improve the educational quality of engineering colleges. But, its effectiveness remains to be seen. "Since students' feedback will be considered while granting promotion to the teachers, they will have to put their best foot forward in the classroom. This assessment pattern is followed by the IITs and NITs," says AICTE chairman Anil Sahasrabudhe.

As per the rule, students' feedback will have 25% weightage in the overall assessment of the faculty, which will be a decisive component for their promotions. Till now, the focus for promoting teachers in colleges has been on the number of research papers published by the faculty members. This was partly the reason for the publication of substandard research papers in fake journals. "Colleges in tier II and III cities, may not have the resources to conduct research. But research publications being given high priority during promotions often leads to the problem of paid journals. The new assessment will thus award good teachers," adds Sahasrabudhe. While some academicians are positive about the impact of this assessment system, others are of the view that students might not be honest with their feedbacks owing to various reasons. "Students are sometimes not objective or may be simply confused while giving feedback for teachers. Their opinions are based on peer thinking. While interacting with the students, I have come across several students who behave differently in class and during one-on-one interactions," says Govinda K, professor, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT). Addressing the concern, Sahasrabudhe says that the number of such students is mostly low, thus the overall score of a teacher who is good at his work is not hampered. "Some students may give poor feedback, probably because the teacher is strict or is not lenient with marks, but this is temporary. In the long run, a teacher who is passionate about teaching and thinks about students' welfare will always be valued by the majority. Also, such an assessment will also ensure better student-teacher communication," he says. This system will allow the teachers to address their weaknesses and improve teaching methods, says KK Mahapatra, dean, Academics at NIT, Rourkela. "Since students are the direct beneficiaries, this will help the teachers to analyse their skills, for instance, maybe there is an issue with communication or students might be finding the teaching method complicated," says Mahapatra.

Source: The Times of India dated 25 March, 2019

Johns Hopkins Assistant Professor Archana Venkataraman Receives NSF CAREER Award

The Indian American professor’s CAREER project, “Small Data in a Big World: Balancing Interpretability and Generalizability for Data Integration in Clinical Neuroscience,” uses the power of machine learning to address the challenges of high data dimensionality and limited sample sizes in clinical neuroscience, the university said......

To read the full article, visit https://www.indiawest.com/news/global_indian/johns-hopkins-assistant-professor-archana-venkataraman-receives-nsf-career-award/article_6b53a23c-4b45-11e9-a915-cf53b17bddf2.html (Accessed on 25 March, 2019)

Abhyasasathee Wi-Fi cha Wapar Kameech (Marathi article)

Source: Loksatta dated 22 March, 2019

Niranjan Karagi’s Nirnal world’s cheapest portable water filter

Sometimes, the inspiration for the most brilliant of inventions can come from the most humbling of places. Such is the case for NirNal founder Niranjan Karagi while he was playing in a schoolyard nearby his home has invented and patented the world’s cheapest water filter which costs Rs.30 and can be used for 100 times and fits any water bottle and this removes 99% of bacteria and other disease-causing water contaminants.

AAB is proud that we were the first ones to cover his project in December 2016, An Engineer Filters the Way to Success.

Niranjan now has many accolades to his name including Best Entrepreneur Award by Deshpande Foundation – Feb 2017, Best Entrepreneur Award by Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) – Jan 2017, Yuva Shilpi Award by Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).

It is a compatible, portable, reusable, healthy and an eco-friendly water purifier. A product that ensures ‘Safe Drinking water ’ at an affordable price. This acts as a filter when the water oozes out of Nirnal fixed to the bottles. It is easy to use, imparts taste and also adds some essential minerals to the water. It uses activated charcoal, Filter cloth.

Niranjan did his schooling from St. Mary’s school Belagavi and PUC from Govindram Seksaria Science College, Belagavi. Later completed Mechanical engineering from Angadi Institute of Technology and Management in Belagavi.

During his free time, he noticed some small children using the playground and filling up their plastic water bottles from a potentially unsafe tap. Bearing witness to the scene, Niranjan reflected sadly on this reality and felt that all children should have clean water despite their income or area of residence. It was certainly not a surprise for the young leader to think of such social issues, given his involvement in the LEAD program at AITM College Belagavi. But it was this particular case that leads him to create something that would make a significant social impact for many people.

Water filtration became the main theme for Niranjan as he began to brainstorm ideas on providing a clean, low-cost source of water. Seeing as his research revealed the relatively high prices charged by competitors for filters, the future entrepreneur settled on creating a water filter that was both very affordable and portable for bottles. His first prototype used materials that were easily accessible around the house but after some assistance from LEAD, a second prototype was created that took Niranjan 4 painstaking months to perfect. The result was a small filter that could be fitted into any standard plastic bottle with an incredibly low cost of 20 rupees.

At that point, all the hard work put into the prototype paid off. Approval was given by the Food Divisional Officer stating that the filter could purify up to 100 liters of water. Furthermore, Niranjan turned to social entrepreneurship as a means of spreading his technology by agreeing to receive tier-ii incubation support in Belagavi by the Sandbox-IMER center. Sandbox Startups was instrumental to the founding of the NirNal enterprise, officially registered with the Ministry of Micro Small and Medium Enterprises in Belagavi. Furthermore, the incubation center gave him a platform to pursue his ideas for his product while gaining business knowledge about scalability and validity for the purposes of society. Complete with networking events, partnership opportunities, mentoring, and investor meetings, Sandbox Startups was an essential springboard to Niranjan’s growth as a social entrepreneur.

The social impact of his product has been significant. With the distribution of his product to various villages, schools, and even India’s military, it is evident that NirNal has been widely acclaimed for its ingenious and inexpensive technology. But on a personal level, Niranjan is happy with the fact that children could use his filter, knowing that they would always have a reliable source of water as they grow up. Niranjan’s initial wish to provide clean water to everyone has become more and more of a reality through the means of his portable water filter. This reality was made possible for thousands of people as 12,000 units of his filter have already been sold.

Indeed, it is exciting to see how NirNal will scale with its water filters. Niranjan himself has stated that he would like to improve the unit even further while maintaining a low price, all while maintaining his goal of providing clean water to all rural people. If he were to truly succeed in his endeavors, there would be much cause for celebration for this ingenious invention.

Order request can be sent from here  

Niranjan can be contacted at +91-888-466-0444 or +91-779-533-9714 or contact@nirnal.in

Source: https://allaboutbelgaum.com/specials/niranjan-karagis-nirnal-worlds-cheapest-portable-water-filter/ (Accessed on March 20, 2019)