One year in, Adult Language and Learning still helping newcomers virtually | Local - Chatham Daily News

The Mission of Adult Language and Learning is to promote and foster personal growth and adjustment for all. 

A local organization that helps newcomers adapt to their communities says it has faced a number of hurdles over the past year but continues to provide service.

Adult Language and Learning, located on King Street West in downtown Chatham, was previously a hub of activity pre-pandemic, with classes, one-on-one meetings and celebratory gatherings.

However, those are still occurring – albeit in different ways – says executive director Tracy Callaghan...

In the meantime, the centre has applied for funding to go towards electronic devices for clients, such as computers, with Callaghan noting that smartphones aren’t suitable for every task, such as online learning.

For more information on the organization and its services, visit www.adultlanguageandlearning.ca/ or search for their page on Facebook.

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Source: Chatham Daily News

 

How Durham County Council’s Adult Learning and Skills Service can help you | The Northern Echo

How Durham County Council’s Adult Learning and Skills Service can help you.

Photo: Durham County Council

From free courses in Maths and English, vocational courses to help you get the job that you want or more specialised courses that support people with special educational needs or disabilities, Durham County Council’s Adult Learning and Skills Service is the place to go.  

Courses are available in person or online – through distance learning or through a virtual classroom...

Find out more about the online and classroom based courses available at www.durham.gov.uk/adultlearning and start your learning journey today. 

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Source: The Northern Echo 

Why AI can’t solve unknown problems | The Machine - VentureBeat

This story originally appeared on Bdtechtalks.com. ___________________________________________________________

When will we have artificial general intelligence, the kind of AI that can mimic the human mind in all aspect? Experts are divided on the topic, and answers range anywhere between a few decades and never, observes Ben Dickson, software engineer and the founder of TechTalks.

Photo: Tech Talks

But what everyone agrees on is that current AI systems are a far shot from human intelligence. Humans can explore the world, discover unsolved problems, and think about their solutions. Meanwhile, the AI toolbox continues to grow with algorithms that can perform specific tasks but can’t generalize their capabilities beyond their narrow domains. We have programs that can beat world champions at StarCraft but can’t play a slightly different game at amateur level. We have artificial neural networks that can find signs of breast cancer in mammograms but can’t tell the difference between a cat and a dog. And we have complex language models that can spin thousands of seemingly coherent articles per hour but start to break when you ask them simple logical questions about the world.

In short, each of our AI techniques manages to replicate some aspects of what we know about human intelligence...

In Algorithms Are Not Enough, Roitblat provides ideas on what to look for to advance AI systems that can actively seek and solve problems that they have not been designed for. We still have a lot to learn from ourselves and how we apply our intelligence in the world.

“Intelligent people can recognize the existence of a problem, define its nature, and represent it,” Roitblat writes. “They can recognize where knowledge is lacking and work to obtain that knowledge. Although intelligent people benefit from structured instructions, they are also capable of seeking out their own sources of information.”

Read more... 

Additional resources

Algorithms Are Not Enough:
Creating General Artificial Intelligence

Source: VentureBeat

Get 'Machine Learning for Cybersecurity Cookbook' ($31.99 value) FREE for a limited time | Security - BetaNews

Wayne Williams, BetaNews' managing editor inform, Organizations today face a major threat in terms of cybersecurity, from malicious URLs to credential reuse, and having robust security systems can make all the difference.

Machine Learning for Cybersecurity Cookbook:
Over 80 recipes on how to implement machine learning algorithms for building security systems using Python

With Machine Learning for Cybersecurity Cookbook you'll learn how to use Python libraries such as TensorFlow and scikit-learn to implement the latest artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and handle challenges faced by cybersecurity researchers.

You'll begin by exploring various machine learning (ML) techniques and tips for setting up a secure lab environment. Next, you'll implement key ML algorithms such as clustering, gradient boosting, random forest, and XGBoost. The book will guide you through constructing classifiers and features for malware, which you'll train and test on real samples...

All you have to do to get your copy for free is go here, enter the required details, and click the Download button.

The offer expires on April 14, so act fast.

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Source: BetaNews

The Romanian platform Brio.ro uses artificial intelligence and launches the training module in mathematics | Module in mathematics - Business Review

Brio.ro, the first and only standardized digital testing platform in Romania, upgrades its types of ​​tests available on the platform, by launching a “training” module in mathematics based on programmatic generation of items. 

At launch, the tests will be available in beta for the first 200 students in grades I-IV who register on the platform (option available in “My Account”), and within approximately one month the tests will be publicly accessible, to be developed later for grades V-VIII and high school...

The mathematics training test module available on Brio.ro  is based on the programmatic, dynamic and randomized generation of items.

Created with the expertise of an extensive team of professors and specialists in psychometrics and marketing, the Brio^® platform integrates hundreds of thousands of tests and has already been used by over 100,000 users. Through this unique training test module, to be patented, Brio^® makes the transition from a diagnostic tool that shows the current level of knowledge to an intervention that helps improve results. The stated objective of the founder of Brio^® is to consolidate the position on the local market, broadening the horizon of the audience, but also of the type of customers. After consolidating on the Romanian market, the company aims at developing Brio.ro internationally.''...

We are already preparing such tests that will offer us more than the measure of children’s school performance, namely the measure of their future adaptability in the society in which they will live,” states Prof. Dragoș Iliescu.

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Source: Business Review

Google Offers Free Online Training and Certification in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Check Details | Specials - DATAQUEST

Google is offering free online training and certification in artificial intelligence and machine learning in fraud detection, chatbots and other topics by DQINDIA Online.

Photo: DATAQUEST

Google has invited applications from interested participants for free online training and certification in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The training is being offered by Google Cloud, and experts from the organisation will conduct the sessions. Some of the experts from Google Cloud who will be taking the sessions are Anu Srivastava, senior developer relations engineer; Lak Lakshmanan, Google cloud’s director of data analytics and AI solutions; Shingi Samudzi, data analyst consultant; and Polong Lin, developer advocate.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Training that Google is Offering for Free

The free training aims at equipping participants with the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning skills, and some of the topics that will be covered are as follows:

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Source: DATAQUEST

The Anarchist Abstractionist — Who was Alexander Grothendieck? | Mathematics - Medium

Mathematician Alexander Grothendieck was born in 1928 to anarchist parents who left him to spend the majority of his formative years with foster parents, writes Jørgen Veisdal, Editor at Cantor’s Paradise. Assistant Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, published in Cantor’s Paradise.

 

Erika Idang’s brilliant 1988 portraits of Grothendieck

His father was murdered in Auschwitz. As his mother was detained, he grew up stateless, hiding from the Gestapo in occupied France. All the while, he taught himself mathematics from books and before his twentieth birthday had re-discovered for himself a proof of the Lebesgue measure, a staple of integration theory. Later a rising star in the hot-shot French mathematical milieu of 1950s and 60s, Grothendieck would in his “golden years” from 1955–1970 move from subject to subject, introducing revolutionary new ideas as he went along:

“This just kept happening over and over again, where he would come upon some problem that people had thought about for, in some cases, a hundred years […] and just completely transformed what people thought the subject was about” — Nick Katz, Princeton University

In 1966 he was awarded the Field’s Medal, mathematics’ highest honour for his contributions to algebraic geometry, homological algebra, and K-theory. Four years later, he famously abandoned his professorship at the “French Institute for Advanced Study” for political reasons. Indeed, he left mathematics altogether in 1991 to instead live in seclusion in a remote village at the foot of the Pyrenees Mountains. Rarely ever seen or heard from since, he spent the last twenty-three years of his life in isolation, refusing to communicate with anyone, at times attempting to sustain himself on “a diet of dandelion soup” while writing thousands upon thousands of pages of text on spirituality and a “coming day of reckoning”.

This is the story of Alexander Grothendieck, perhaps the most technically gifted mathematician of the twentieth century. Estimated reading time is 25 minutes...

At the time of his death in 2014, mathematicians David Mumford and John Tate were asked to write an obituary for him for Nature magazine. It can be accessed in its entirety on Mumford’s website here.

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Source: Medium

Student-staff collaborations to enhance the remote learning environment | Engineering - Imperial College London

Chemical engineering undergraduates and teaching staff have designed several projects to enhance collaboration in virtual spaces, says Sara West, Communications Manager - Department of Chemical Engineering Department of Chemical Engineering.

Photo: Imperial College London

A group of undergraduates have teamed up with Chemical Engineering Teaching Fellows on several projects to enhance the virtual learning experience. They have focused on trialling tools for collaborative learning, both within and outside the curriculum, ranging from assessed activities to informal group-learning.

Their projects have produced a range of digital tools that undergraduate and masters’ students can utilise to collaborate with their teachers and peers online...

Imperial Chem Eng Wiki

The Imperial Chem Eng Wiki site was created by Chemical Engineering undergraduates Thomas Nok Hin Cheng and Pierre Walker. Their vision was to create a site where they could consolidate learning materials for their modules, including lectures notes, and facilitate the sharing of learning resources in a communal online space.

Thomas and Pierre launched the Wiki in February 2020, just before the first UK national lockdown and the start of remote teaching. They trialled it with second-year students who were revising for their summer term exams. In a follow-up survey, 95% of respondents said they found the Wiki useful and thought it helped them retrieve information and consolidate concepts...

Next steps 

These student-staff collaborations have led to transforming the delivery of content and assessment in a more engaging and helpful manner. Moreover, several students have shown interest in improving these resources further for the benefit of their peers in the future and on-going work to strengthen these projects are planned for the 2021 Summer period.

Read more... 

Source: Imperial College London

‘Schools need to update their priorities to accommodate a hybrid learning future’ | Comment - Independent Education Today

As new methods of attack emerge, Mark Belgrove, head of cyber consultancy at Exponential-e, says schools need to make cyber security a priority to safeguard students.

Photo: Independent Education Today

The education industry has been a top target for cyber criminals since the rise of remote learning. Just weeks ago, laptops issued to vulnerable children to support their remote learning were infected with a strain of malware linked to servers in Russia, and more recently 15 Nottinghamshire schools fell victim to a sophisticated cyber-attack that forced them to shut down their IT networks. Both served as a stark wake-up call for the education sector....

The past year has pushed an already emerging trend toward hybrid learning into the mainstream. And even though students and staff are now back in school, it has never been more important for the education sector to make cyber security a priority when it comes to safeguarding students, as well as physical safety while on school grounds...

...Remote learning has been indispensable during lockdown and provided a powerful foundation for new channels of education, many of which are expected to remain prominent for hybrid learning methods post-pandemic. 

These innovations augur well for the future, but with every innovation comes an extended and more complex threat landscape. Many technology partners possess the expertise in hands-on security monitoring, cutting-edge threat intelligence, and secure, compliant hosting of sensitive data, to help education institutions adopt a robust approach to security that is tailored to the systems, tools and materials being used by pupils and staff.

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Source: Independent Education Today 

Top 5 Remote Learning Tools for Students | College - Study Breaks

Top five must-have remote learning tools to make your distance learning successful and hassle-free. Pick software to help you with time management, planning, and note-taking.

Just because you're apart from your classmates doesn't mean that you can't work together.
Photo: Oluwatobi Fasipe on Unsplash

Modern students can study in different ways: in a large class, individually with a teacher, remotely, or even independently. And distance learning takes a special place here. It has many advantages and is an excellent alternative to the classic lessons. However, it also comes with several drawbacks that can jeopardize the success of the whole idea. In practice, both students and teachers face serious difficulties that prevent successful learning:

• Difficulty in adapting to the online format of learning — moving from traditional classroom learning to an online learning hub makes the process completely different and decreases its effectiveness;
• Low computer literacy — the lack of computer literacy is a serious problem in the modern world that has affected both students and teachers;
• Not knowing the basics of time management – the freedom that the online learning format offers often decreases one’s vigilance and creates a false sense of time. Distance education puts higher demands on discipline and self-organization;
• Poor self-motivation — a lack of motivation is a common problem for the majority of students. The online format requires a lot of discipline and dedication to complete assignments on your own, stay motivated and make progress.

Obviously, there are many advantages of e-learning; however, distance education still results in some problems. So how to make the transition from offline to online learning as effective as possible? How to build a distance learning system without the need to spend days on end only to get middle-level marks in the end?...

...Of course, distance learning is very different from traditional ways of learning, which gives rise to certain problems. 

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Source: Study Breaks