学校生活
作者： 袁丹纯The virtual assistant
虚 拟 助 教
Professor Ashok Goel of Georgia Tech （佐治亚理工学院） developed an artificially intelligent teaching robot， knowledge based artificial intelligence， to help handle the enormous number of students questions in the online class. This online course is a core requirement of Georgia Tech s online Master of Science （理科硕士） in Computer Science program. Professor Goel already had eight teaching assistants， but that wasn t enough to deal with the overwhelming number of daily questions from students.
Many students drop out of online courses because of the lack of teaching support.When students feel isolated or confused and reach out with questions that go unanswered， their motivation to continue begins to taper off. Professor Goel decided to do something to remedy this situation and his solution was to create a virtual assistant named Jill Watson， which is based on the IBM Watson Platform.
Goel and his team developed several versions of Jill Watson before releasing her to the online forums. At first， the virtual assistant wasn t too great. But Goel and his team sourced （获得） the online discussion forum to find all the 40，000 questions that had ever been answered since the class was launched. Then they began to feed Jill with the questions and answers. After some adjustments and sufficient time， Jill was able to answer the students questions correctly 97% of the time. So advanced and realistic was the virtual assistant that the students didn t know she was a computer.
The students， who were studying artificial intelligence， were interacting with the virtual assistant and couldn t tell it apart from a real human being. Not until April 26 did Goel inform them about Jill s true identity. To his great delight， the students were actually positive about the experience.
Next year， Professor Goel s virtual assistant will be supposed to take over answering 40% of all the questions posed by students on the online forum. The name Jill Watson will， of course， change to something else next semester. Professor Goel has a much rosier outlook on the future of artificial intelligence than， say， Elon Musk， Stephen Hawking， Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak.
Activity A Reading for understanding
Ⅰ. Text centered chunks
knowledge based 基于知识的
drop out of 退出
taper off 逐渐减少
interact with 和……互动
tell...apart from 将……与……区分
to one s delight 让某人高兴的是
be positive about 对……积极
be supposed to do 应该做……
take over 接管
have a rosy outlook on 对……有乐观的看法
Ⅱ. Text centered sentences
一、非谓语
1. When students feel isolated or confused and reach out with questions that go unanswered， their motivation to continue begins to taper off. 当学生们感到被孤立或者困惑且提出的问题没有得到答案时，他们继续学习的动力就会开始逐渐减弱。
【点石成金】go unanswered中的go作系动词，后接形容词，意为“变成;变为;变得（尤指朝坏的方面）”。
【运用迁移】当听到明天要去公园野炊时，孩子们欣喜若狂。
2. Next year， Professor Goel s virtual assistant will be supposed to take over answering 40% of all the questions posed by students on the online forum. 明年，Goel教授的虚拟助教将会负责回答学生在在线论坛上提出的所有问题的40%。