Epunchng - Most read newspaper in Nigeria Thursday, December 7, 2017 | Page 3

Gadget smart With THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2017 3 09080019063 (SMS only) [email protected] Ife Ogunfuwa • Source: www.gpbnews.org A Benefits of applying artificial intelligence to education RTIFICIAL Intelligence has the potential to greatly improve and change education systems across the world. There is a strong possibility for artificial intelligence to be used to help teachers effectively streamline their instruction process and to help students receive more personalised help that is specifically suited to their strengths and weaknesses. Dataconomy.com says ideally, AI will also help to complete some of the more menial tasks that teachers and teaching assistants have to work on, freeing them up to spend even more time helping students. There has been a lot of progress in this field in the past few years, as more and more companies have been involved in projects that aim to augment, improve, and change the way teaching is done. The field of education is definitely ripe for innovation, and the advancement of artificial intelligence may be able to provide that innovation. The right applications of AI can result in students having a vastly more detailed and substantial education, as AI programme can do way more to identify and target their individual strengths and weaknesses, and teachers can be aided by AI in order to have a larger amount of impactful teaching time with their students. Overall, education systems all over the world stand to greatly benefit from the proper integration of artificial intelligence in their schools. teaching from AI and then their teachers will be able to step in to provide more help once the AI has done the basic teaching and identified which concepts they struggle with and which ones they understand just fine. Personalised education with AI AI can provide a lot of benefits in the way that it has the potential to help schools personalise education for their students. There are many companies currently exploring the possibilities of AI being used to help tutor students. Companies such as Carnegie Learning , Thinkster Math and Socratic are pioneering in this field, as they have developed services designed to help tutor students with their homework as well as the areas of math that they struggle with. The benefit to this type of service is that it allows students to get something closer to a one- on-one teaching experience that is able to identify their strengths and weaknesses in a low pressure and convenient environment. It is simply not feasible for a teacher to be able to provide this level of deep personalised teaching to each student, but with more advanced AI programmes, schools will be able to provide their students with that type of personalised AI could be used to grade students’ work AI can also do a great deal to help the education system by aiding teachers with some of their more menial tasks. Currently, teachers have to take a pretty solid chunk of time out of their days in order to grade assignments, tests and papers, as well as do other sorts of basic book-keeping. With the proper implementation, an AI system could eventually be able to step in and take care of this sort of work. Automating a solid amount of a teacher’s more menial tasks would open up a substantial portion of their schedule, allowing them to focus on more significant quality time with students and give them more time to focus on their lesson plans and on the statuses of each of their students. This would all be great for the students’ education because they would have more quality time to spend being personally instructed by their teacher. Ultimately, there is a fantastic amount of good things that AI can do for education systems if properly implemented. Numerous companies are working on exciting AI programmes that are positioned to add a great deal to the educational experience for both teachers and their students. AI programmes can be integrated into schools in order to help students study their coursework at all times, as well as identify which mathematical concepts they are struggling with and provide them with extra support in order to better understand the points that they are struggling with. There are also exciting possibilities in terms of AI programmes being able to automate the more menial tasks that teachers currently handle manually. The automation of these tasks would open up a great deal of time for teachers to spend on more valuable parts of the educational experience. Overall, artificial intelligence can greatly improve education systems through its ability to streamline many parts of a teacher’s job, and automate other parts, ultimately giving them more and more time to spend directly on their students. #Takeaway A Botnet botnet is a group of computers that are controlled from a single source and run related software programmes and scripts. While botnets can be used for distributed computing purposes, such as a scientific processing, the term usually refers to multiple computers that have been infected with malicious software, www.techterms.com says. In order to create a malicious botnet, a hacker must first compromise several computers. This may be done by exploiting a security hole through a Web browser, IRC chat programme, or a computer’s operating system. For example, if a user has turned off the default firewall settings, his or her computer may be susceptible to such a botnet attack. Once the hacker has gained access to several computers, he can run automated programmes or “bots” on all the systems at the same time. A hacker may create a botnet for several different purposes, such as spreading viruses, sending e-mail spam, or crashing Web servers using a denial of service attack. Botnets can range from only a few computers to several thousand machines. While large botnets can cause the most damage, they are also easiest to locate and break apart. The unusual amount of bandwidth used by large botnets may trigger an alert at one or more Internet Service Providers, which might lead to the discovery and dismantling of the botnet. In most situations, users do not know that their computers have become part of a botnet. This is because hackers typically hide their intrusion by masking the activity within regular processes, similar to a rootkit attack. Therefore, it is a good idea to install antivirus or anti- malware software that regularly checks for such intrusions on your computer. It is also wise to make sure your system firewall is turned on, which is usually the default setting.