College students now are wired, wireless, Sidekicked, Facebooked, YouTubed and bleeping with instant messages and text messages. But try getting an important announcement out to everyone on campus.
It's the flip side of all the technology: Students are more connected than ever -- but surprisingly tricky for administrators to reach.
Land lines are all but obsolete. Cellphone numbers are slippery. And e-mail gets lost, overlooked, erased or ignored.
"Everyone is hoping there's not some emergency where they can't get in touch with students," said Gwendolyn Dungy of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators.
At Virginia Tech, a police search for a gunman on the first day of the fall semester left administrators scrambling to warn tens of thousands of people to stay inside. "That was a very clear indicator that the ways that we reach students are changing, that we have to stay ahead of the curve," spokesman Mark Owczarski said
Few miss an update about a snow day -- in part because everyone is looking for it. And there's no question news can travel more quickly now. But some administrators say that technology can complicate both warnings and routine announcements, such as deadlines for housing, tuition bills and registration.
School officials are more worried about this now "because in the past we didn't have so many options," Dungy said. "They had telephones -- land lines -- and they used them. Now, with so many options, people are trying to find the ultimate, the sure-fire. And there is no sure-fire today."
Every school has a crisis plan, especially since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Parents assume that their children can be reached immediately. But although parents usually have their children's cell numbers programmed on their phones, most school officials don't.
And technology changes so quickly that by the time the bureaucracy at the institution is up to speed, Dungy said, something new has come out and the students have moved on to it.
Schools across the country are experimenting with a bewildering array of tactics to contact students. And everyone's watching for the next big thing -- something simple that would work.
It's not that students don't have the tools; nearly every single one has a cellphone, and most have laptops. But they don't use them the way administrators do.
Take e-mail. It's a cheap, easy and instantaneous way to blast a message across the quad. Most faculty and staff rely on e-mail for both business and personal messages. But for many students, it's an afterthought.
Some rarely use e-mail; with friends, it's quicker to instant-message or Facebook or call. Others check e-mail often but don't get to the official messages in their overstuffed inboxes.
Students at Trinity University in the District often ignore their campus e-mail accounts, President Patricia McGuire said. "Mailboxes fill up -- they don't answer anything. At the end of the semester, IT has to go in and empty everything. It's a mess, it's really a mess."
It is a worry, said Betsy Muhlenfeld, president of Sweet Briar College. "It's just ironic that here we are with more gadgets than any of us need and we find it more difficult rather than less so," she said.
Ryan Brier's e-mail box is bulging with announcements from George Washington University. "I try my best to sort through the subject lines, but definitely some e-mails have fallen through the cracks," he said. Like the time he almost missed a deadline and had to scramble to register for his next-semester classes in a couple of hours.
"Most of us are pretty OCD about checking e-mail," said Melissa Minsberg, a senior at GWU, "but whether we read it or not . . ."
Advanced palmtops held by student which depict technological
breakthroughs ever taking place in modern era.
breakthroughs ever taking place in modern era.
Like most students, she has several accounts to keep track of. Although she's constantly deleting random messages from GWU, her campus inbox fills up every couple of weeks, she said, and e-mails get bounced out. "I'll get announcements that I could care less about, or fellowships that don't pertain to me," Minsberg said. Sometimes she opens something quickly, then forgets about it -- like the time she didn't sign up for housing in time.
Campus accounts can be clunky, with not enough storage space or too much spam.
Brier never gives out his GWU e-mail address -- except to people he doesn't really want to hear from.
Some schools still send out mass messages to the campus dorm phones, to voice mails that many students never check or never bothered to set up.
"I don't know anyone who has a land line," said Georgetown University junior Ted Reilly.
But reaching students by cellphone can be tricky, too: Many students consider the numbers private and switch them often. Some school officials talk of "trying to capture cell numbers," conjuring up images of people running around with butterfly nets.
For the most important announcements, such as Virginia Tech's manhunt, schools usually try means such as campus TV and university-wide software. "Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts," said Kara Danner of George Mason University. "There's not one clear way."
Many schools are going ever-higher tech, trying to catch up with their students.
At the University of South Florida, several thousand students have signed up for a cellphone program that links them in groups to one another and to the administration. Soon, the school will launch a program that will allow students to use their cellphones to check things such as menus and emergency closings and will allow the administration to send simultaneous messages to all.
Some schools, including the University of Maryland and GMU, are launching Web portals, in effect customizing the Web site so that each student gets just the e-mail, basketball scores and updates he or she needs, said Danner, director of portal communications at GMU.
GWU students can sign up for text-message alerts to their cellphones from the District's emergency system; Virginia Tech is considering signing up with a company that works with other universities.
At GU, students have said they might be interested in text alerts -- but not for routine announcements. They said it would be too intrusive, , and they didn't want to get stuck paying for them.
Schools add updates to the Web, post podcasts and send feeds to subscribers.
Most schools avoid putting notices on sites such as Facebook, although they know that students would find them. "That's like nailing Jell-O to a wall," McGuire said, with sites shifting in popularity and new ones popping up.
Brier said that recently a friend realized at the last minute that he needed to fill out paperwork to graduate from GWU. He couldn't believe that the school hadn't e-mailed a reminder.
Brier laughed and told him, "They probably did."
E-mail certainly isn't perfect, Brier said, but added, "I don't know if there is a better way."
Sometimes, McGuire said, the most effective way is the lowest-tech: At Trinity, they scatter paper notices on lunch tables and tape them to the insides of restroom doors. "You get right in their face," she said.
Artificial Intelligence:A Deeper Look
The search for AI has taken two major directions: psychological and physiological research
Some schools, including the University of Maryland and GMU, are launching Web portals, in effect customizing the Web site so that each student gets just the e-mail, basketball scores and updates he or she needs, said Danner, director of portal communications at GMU.
GWU students can sign up for text-message alerts to their cellphones from the District's emergency system; Virginia Tech is considering signing up with a company that works with other universities.
At GU, students have said they might be interested in text alerts -- but not for routine announcements. They said it would be too intrusive, , and they didn't want to get stuck paying for them.
Schools add updates to the Web, post podcasts and send feeds to subscribers.
Most schools avoid putting notices on sites such as Facebook, although they know that students would find them. "That's like nailing Jell-O to a wall," McGuire said, with sites shifting in popularity and new ones popping up.
Brier said that recently a friend realized at the last minute that he needed to fill out paperwork to graduate from GWU. He couldn't believe that the school hadn't e-mailed a reminder.
Brier laughed and told him, "They probably did."
E-mail certainly isn't perfect, Brier said, but added, "I don't know if there is a better way."
Sometimes, McGuire said, the most effective way is the lowest-tech: At Trinity, they scatter paper notices on lunch tables and tape them to the insides of restroom doors. "You get right in their face," she said.
Artificial Intelligence:A Deeper Look
I | DEVELOPMENT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |
In 1956 American social scientist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and American physicist and computer scientist Allan Newell at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania devised a program called Logic Theorist that simulated human thinking on computers. The first AI conference occurred at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1956. This conference inspired researchers to undertake projects that emulated human behavior in the areas of reasoning, language comprehension, and communications. In addition to Newell and Simon, computer scientists and mathematicians Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky, and John McCarthy laid the groundwork for creating “thinking” machines from computers.
The search for AI has taken two major directions: psychological and physiological research
into the nature of human thought, and the technological development of increasingly sophisticated computing systems. Some AI developers are primarily interested in learning more about the workings of the human brain and thus attempt to mimic its methods and processes. Other developers are more interested in making computers perform a specific task, which may involve computing methods well beyond the capabilities of the human brain.
Contemporary fields of interest resulting from early AI research include expert systems, cellular automata (treating pieces of data like biological cells), and artificial life (see Automata Theory). The search for AI goes well beyond computer science and involves cross-disciplinary studies in such areas as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, cybernetics, information theory, and mechanical engineering, among many others. The search for AI has led to advancements in those fields, as well.
II | USES AND CHALLENGES OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |
AI programs have a broad array of applications. They are used by financial institutions, scientists, psychologists, medical practitioners, design engineers, planning authorities, and security services, to name just a few. AI techniques are also applied in systems used to browse the Internet.
AI programs tend to be highly specialized for a specific task. They can play games, predict stock values, interpret photographs, diagnose diseases, plan travel itineraries, translate languages, take dictation, draw analogies, help design complex machinery, teach logic, make jokes, compose music, create drawings, and learn to do tasks better. AI programs perform some of these tasks well. In a famous example, a supercomputer called Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. In developing its strategy, Deep Blue utilized parallel processing (interlinked and concurrent computer operations) to process 200 million chess moves per second. AI programs are often better than people at predicting stock prices, and they can create successful long-term business plans. AI programs are used in electronic commerce to detect possible fraud, using complex learning algorithms, and are relied upon to authorize billions of financial transactions daily. AI programs can also mimic creative human behavior. For example, AI-generated music can sound like compositions by famous composers.
Some of the most widely used AI applications involve information processing and pattern recognition. For example, one AI method now widely used is “data mining,” which can find interesting patterns in extremely large databases. Data mining is an application of machine learning, in which specialized algorithms enable computers to “learn.” Other applications include information filtering systems that discover user interests in an online environment. However, it remains unknown whether computer programs could ever learn to solve problems on their own, rather than simply following what they are programmed to do.
AI programs can make medical diagnoses as well as, or better than, most human doctors. AI programs have been developed that analyze the disease symptoms, medical history, and laboratory test results of a patient, and then suggest a diagnosis to the physician. The diagnostic program is an example of expert systems, which are programs designed to perform tasks in specialized areas as a human would. Expert systems take computers a step beyond straightforward programming, being based on a technique called rule-based inference, in which preestablished rule systems are used to process the data. Despite their sophistication, expert systems still do not approach the complexity of true intelligent thought.
Despite considerable successes AI programs still have many limitations, which are especially obvious when it comes to language and speech recognition. Their translations are imperfect, although good enough to be understood, and their dictation is reliable only if the vocabulary is predictable and the speech unusually clear. Research has shown that whereas the logic of language structure (syntax) submits to programming, the problem of meaning (semantics) lies far deeper, in the direction of true AI (or “strong” AI, in the parlance of developers). Developing natural-language capabilities in AI systems is an important focus of AI research. It involves programming computers to understand written or spoken information and to produce summaries, answer specific questions, or redistribute information to users interested in specific areas. Essential to such programs is the ability of the system to generate grammatically correct sentences and to establish linkages between words, ideas, and associations with other ideas. “Chatterbot” programs, although far from natural conversationalists, are a step in that direction. They attempt to simulate an intelligent conversation by scanning input keywords to come up with pre-prepared responses from a database.
Much work in AI models intellectual tasks, as opposed to the sensory, motor, and adaptive abilities possessed by all mammals. However, an important branch of AI research involves the development of robots, with the goal of creating machines that can perceive and interact with their surroundings. WABOT-2, a robot developed by Waseda University in Japan in the 1980s, utilized AI programs to play a keyboard instrument, read sheet music, and converse rudimentarily with people. It was a milestone in the development of “personal” robots, which are expected to be anthropomorphous—that is, to emulate human attributes. AI robots are being developed as personal assistants for hospitalized patients and disabled persons, among other purposes. Natural-language capabilities are integral to these efforts. In addition, scientists with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are developing robust AI programs designed to enable the next generation of Mars rovers to make decisions for themselves, rather than relying on (and waiting for) detailed instructions from teams of human controllers on Earth.
To match everything that people can do, AI systems would need to model the richness and subtlety of human memory and common sense. Many of the mechanisms behind human intelligence are still poorly understood, and computer programs can simulate the complex processes of human thought and cognition only to a limited extent. Even so, an AI system does not necessarily need to mimic human thought to achieve an intelligent answer or result, such as a winning chess move, as it may rely on its own “superhuman” computing power.
