Are robots coming for us and our work? The dystopian answer to that question is clearly “yes,” a perspective that has dominated our conversation about artificial beings ever since the word “robot” was ...

Most people wouldn't think to teach five-year-olds how to hit a baseball by handing them a bat and ball, telling them to toss the objects into the air in a zillion different combinations and hoping ...

One of Audrey Watters’s observations in her deeply researched Teaching Machines is that ed-tech evangelists seldom make an effort to learn the history of educational technologies. For those ...

The research comes from the University of Michigan. Here computer scientists have shown that a different form of neural network, composed of memristors, can improve the efficiency of teaching machines ...

From the 1920s American psychologists experimented with teaching using machines. Inspired, in part, by the expansion of schooling, especially at the secondary level; the success of paper-and-pencil ...

As I was reading Audrey Watters’s Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, recently published by MIT Press, the word “landmark” kept occurring to me.[1] This is a landmark book. It is ...

With machine learning (ML) at the heart of much of modern computing, the interesting question is: How do machines learn? There’s a lot of deep computer science in machine learning, producing models ...

To its 5,000 salesmen across the U.S., Grolier Inc., publisher of America’s oldest encyclopedia, last week handed out an odd-looking new product to sell door to door. A green, windowed, sheet-metal ...

Machine teaching is the practice of infusing context -- and often business consequences -- into the selection of training data used in machine learning (ML) so that the most relevant outputs are ...