Does homework matter, in a college gen-ed science course? I’ve been thinking more about this question over the past year or two, as AI tools are able to quickly and correctly answer nearly all questions I could pose to students (see this 2024 post, for example, or the examples below). I often teach general-education courses … Continue reading Some data on homework and its correlations
It’s February 2025 and this, like some of my other recent posts (here, here), could be a snapshot of a landscape being transformed by the roaring river of artificial intelligence. But it isn’t. Rather, I’ll describe my puzzlement that some parts of the landscape that I’m close to aren’t changing much, and speculate about the … Continue reading Why Don’t Academics Care About Artificial Intelligence?
Last term (Fall 2024) I again taught the computational image analysis course I developed a few years ago (see 2021, 2022). It was again a mixed graduate and undergraduate course, this time with an enrollment of 18: 14 graduate and 4 undergraduate. For a primarily graduate elective course, this is a large number of students; … Continue reading Image Analysis Course Recap, Fall 2024
I’m always interested to hear who won the latest Physics Nobel Prize, and today’s announcement was particularly exciting: John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” Is it surprising? Is it controversial? Apparently yes. I predicted Hopfield in response to a friend’s poll a few … Continue reading The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics — Yes, Physics!
You will find this post either shocking or obvious. If it’s obvious, you may nonetheless be shocked that others don’t find it obvious, or by how quickly the situation it describes has gone from shocking to obvious. The topic is AI (artificial intelligence) and teaching, which I will illustrate with an example. Below are a … Continue reading AI and exams in May 2024
The Eighteenth Elephant 