Agent Smith: Teaching Question Answering to Jill Watson

Understand

Building AI agents can be costly.

• Consider a question answering agent such as Jill Watson that automatically answers students' questions on the discussion forums of online classes based on their syllabi and other course materials.
• Training a Jill on the syllabus of a new online class can take a hundred hours or more.
• Machine teaching - interactive teaching of an AI agent using synthetic data sets - can reduce the training time because it combines the advantages of knowledge-based AI, machine learning using large data sets, and interactive human-in-loop training.