The buzz around artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool that can help improve efficiency in schools has been growing. In a nutshell, ‘AI is the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings’*. While this may seem like a futuristic concept, many of us are using forms of AI already without giving it a second thought, such as chatbots when interacting with websites or simple macros being taught in the classroom.
AI is also commonly mentioned in discussions around STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math), ensuring that we are equipping today’s students with the skills they require to think critically and be relevant in the workplace of the future. Alongside this, AI has many applications that focus on making the life of teachers and administrators easier, freeing up time to focus on learning outcomes and teaching future skills.
Innovation in AI at Fuji Xerox
At Fuji Xerox’s world-renowned laboratory in Palo Alto (PAL) and at our Asia-Pacific Innovation Hub located in Sydney, work is being done to ‘invent the future of work by developing technologies to realise an intelligent workspace and an elastic workstyle’^. There are several examples of AI-based innovations that are being produced by the lab that could make tasks carried out by teachers and administrators more efficient.
In our first series of blog posts on AI innovation in education, an overview of unique pattern recognition technology is provided.
Unique Pattern Recognition
There are nearly transparent marks printed on paper documents that signify the existence of media associated with that part of the document. Fuji Xerox has patented search algorithms that allow these unique patterns to be used to find a duplicate document among millions of documents in a few seconds. This has applications in education for streamlining tasks, such as checking the copyright of documents to ensure compliance and enable more accurate accounting for any associated costs.
Example application of unique pattern recognition in Education
-
-
- Automatically checking for copyright across 1.5 million documents within 2 to 3 seconds
- Can check text-based documents or pictures and images with 98% accuracy
- Audit all the content which is printed and shared
-
Currently, in many schools, copyright charges are managed through cost estimates based on a sample of schools using copyrighted material. The activity of schools is manually audited and reported upon, taking weeks and months to manage. The results are then extrapolated to other schools to provide an estimate of charges relating to copyright. With instant digital reporting on copyrighting use there is more accuracy and transparency in managing copyright charges.
This also reduces time consuming, expensive manual checking and creates process efficiency for copyright agencies.
Following the same principle, it could also be used to check images and text to ensure that no plagiarism has occurred.
Below is an example of a pattern matching workflow. The process depicted can identify copyright and plagiarism breaches within 2-3 seconds regardless of the image being text or picture based.
It also can be used to stop documents and attachments being sent to people who are not authorised to see them, allowing confidentiality of key information to be maintained.
Want to know more?
If you are interested in finding out more about these innovative technologies and the work of Fuji Xerox PAL you can visit their website http://www.fxpal.com/.
* Source: https://www.britannica.com/technology/artificial-intelligence
^ Source: http://www.fxpal.com/about/
