Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, talks about how we have known that learning works best with a one-on-one tutor who encourages the student to keep working until mastery is achieved. We can't afford, or find, enough excellent human tutors, so the question is whether there are technologies that are ready to handle the job, and whether anything is different now than in decades past. We will review the state of the art in online teaching, and where the practice may be heading.
Peter Norvig was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, making him NASA's senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has served as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and a research faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He has over fifty publications in Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering, including the books Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading textbook in the field), Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world's longest palindromic sentence.
Sponsored by the Computer Science and Engineering Department (http://www.cse.umich.edu/)
