The latest initiative aims to use tools to provide content curation with AI in order to make education more accessible to everyone. Every one of us has had to endure the horrible prospect of seeing an extended video of a presentation, college lecture, or business “fireside chat.” The COVID-19 lockdown, which has transformed many of us into groggy remote workers and learners, has only served to accelerate this trend.
Advantages of content curation with AI
Finding relevant high-quality information from other sources and promoting it to increase your authority and engagement is the goal of content curation. Curation may be automated using AI and machine learning, much like content generation.
Content curation with AI not only assists in content selection, but these tools also customize the result for each contact depending on their specific preferences. Education is a key concept for every nation, you can also learn how could AI transform developing countries in our article.
Every day, businesses and educational institutions produce hundreds of millions of hours of long-form video, but because editing and production costs can be astronomical, the majority of us are unable to fully benefit from these productions.
To resolve this paradox, Educational Vision Technologies (EVT) was founded. To do this, EVT has created a pair of services that make long-form video content more palatable for knowledge workers and university students. They utilize machine learning and tools that provide content curation with AI. These services use machine learning algorithms to divide videos into manageable chapters of just a few minutes each, each of which is accompanied by a full transcript and other notes.
The program, which was first designed with the needs of students with disabilities in mind, also helps abled students who are unable to attend class or who find the note-taking aid useful, as well as knowledge and other remote employees. EVT’s founder and CEO, Monal Parmar, observes:
“Studies have shown that it takes more cognitive effort to take notes while trying to listen to a lecture than it does to play chess. It doesn’t make sense for students to overexert their cognitive bandwidth to write everything from the whiteboard or chalkboard. Providing notes gives students the flexibility to take as few or as many notes as work best for them.”
According to research from Kansas State University, students who are using “externally provided lecture notes… generally achieve more on exams than do learners who review their own notes.”
A number of University of California San Diego (UCSD) departments, a few other universities, and a professional training organization all use the EVT service.
Joanna Boval, head of the UCSD office for students with disabilities, writes in a letter that students with disabilities “participate in an academic lecture numerous times and at the student’s individual pace.”
According to Parmar, EVT has raised $700,000 and presently employs four full-time staff members and three contractors.
A number of sales prospects, according to him, have resulted from the company’s participation in the Oracle for Startups program, which was used to build the company’s service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). He clarifies:
“Many cloud accelerator programs are just called accelerators in name but do little more than provide cloud credits and some technical guidance. Oracle’s does a lot more than that.”
EVT is powered by ML
EVT provides its services in two different forms. Customers can upload their own movies for content curation on EVT Bloom, while EVT Learning Systems employs a device that is located on-site.
EVT Bloom automatically generates an interactive table of contents, a searchable voice transcript, speaker summaries, and quiz questions by segmenting recordings into concise video chapters using machine learning. On EVT’s web platform, the titles of the brief videos are put as headers so that a screen reader may read them aloud and help those who are blind or visually impaired access the video material more easily.
In order to grow the service, the business faced a variety of machine learning hurdles, according to Parmar. It also had to deal with hardware flaws including overheating, unstable power supplies, networking problems, and supply chain disruptions on the on-premises device utilized by EVT Learning Systems. The software product, however, had a more simplified development process.
“We simply transferred many of our core algorithms to the cloud and turned them into microservices,” said Parmar.
The price of EVT Bloom subscription plans, which are invoiced annually, ranges from $33 per hour of video to $60 per hour. According to Parmar, AI-curated content for one-hour courses is ready in 30 minutes, and completely corrected versions in 24 hours.
Although UCSD has long been utilizing technology to advance its objective of delivering fair and inclusive learning to a diverse student population, the COVID-19 epidemic hastened the acceptance of it there. Its Chancellor Pradeep Khosla said in a statement:
“They have helped us not only improve accessibility, but also improve student satisfaction for distance learning.”
Oracle has its own solutions
EVT Bloom processing takes place on OCI, and the content is secured and kept in OCI Object Storage. Parmar clarifies:
“We developed our machine learning microservices on OCI. Over many meetings, Oracle’s engineers guided us to prototype and develop our machine learning microservice infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For any technical challenge, Oracle engineers have been ready to support us and regularly check in to see how things are going.”
Given that EVT offers hundreds of educational videos that are broadcast from its website, Parmar observes that cloud expenses could have been a deciding issue for his business. But because the Oracle content curation service doesn’t charge egress for the first 10TB per month, it was able to significantly reduce the cost of video streaming. It is also important to discuss how Ethical AI should be.
When the pandemic struck, Parmar had just graduated from UCSD with a bachelor of science in electrical and computer engineering and was simultaneously working on his company and pursuing a master’s degree with an emphasis on machine learning. He explains, “Something had to give.
He intends to resume his graduate studies in 2023 or 2024 and might use his own idea to complete his degree.
