Dr Chris Trace, Chief Academic Officer At KEATH.ai, Discusses The Future Of AI, Ethics, And Disruption In Education In Dinis Guarda YouTube Podcast

Dr Chris Trace, Chief Academic Officer at KEATH.ai, shares how AI is transforming education, the need for adaptability, ethical concerns around algorithmic bias, and the importance of keeping humans in the loop in AI-driven learning systems in the latest episode of the Dinis Guarda Podcast. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net, Citiesabc.com, Wisdomia.ai, and Sportsabc.org.

Dr. Chris Trace is the Chief Academic Officer at KEATH.ai, an AI EdTech start-up that originated from the University of Surrey. He has also represented KEATH.ai at significant platforms, including UNESCO in Paris and the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) in London. Prior to this, Dr. Chris was the Head of Digital Learning at the University of Surrey, where he led digital innovation and supported academic staff in using contemporary technological tools.

During the interview with Dinis Guarda, Dr. Chris discusses the importance of adaptability in the face of technological disruptions:

“One of the things I guess I tried to always educate my students when I was a veterinary educator is being comfortable and getting comfortable with disruption and being able to cope and adapt. That is such a sought-after skill right now. 

In veterinary education, I’ve seen examples within medical education where scenarios are created that are no win, that people cannot win. If we can all get towards a point where we are more comfortable with change because change is constant right now, that’s a big if.

Being able to go with the flow to adapt quickly is more and more a skill that people will be looking for and valuing. If we’re able as a society to empower that, it’ll help with the stresses and mental health challenges that come from anxiety related to change.

Many institutions, especially universities, are not always built for disruption because a lot of things haven’t needed to be. The structures that we put in place, the way we can move towards more agility and flexibility, will pay off really well in the future.”

AI, ethics, and human impact

Dr. Chris Trace’s perspective on AI, ethics, and the challenges AI systems can create when biases from human input are reflected in their outputs:

“AI opens up Pandora’s box in some respects and it has never been easier, for example, for students to cheat. It has democratised the ability now, it’s not just rich students who can afford somebody to write their essays, everybody can go away and get an AI to write an essay for them.

There are risks, there are challenges, there are issues, the challenge is not the AI, it’s the humans that have been involved in the process.

Some of the early things I saw from AI were things like AI proctored exams, where students were flagged as cheating based on the color of their skin.

There was racial bias in terms of the color of a student’s skin, directly correlating with how often it would flag them as cheating. Students with black skin were being flagged much more often as cheating or looking away purely because the software was trained up on white students.

If you were to ask an image-generating AI to create a picture of a grandmother baking a cake, and you change the prompt to say a ‘black grandmother’, the AI would generate her in a commercial kitchen with commercial kitchen garb on, cooking for somebody else. That bias has come from somewhere.

A company asked AI to go and recruit their next batch of staff, and they found it was just recruiting all the same kinds of people again.

It was recruiting people of a particular class, a particular background, with a particular education, and quite often, a particular color of their skin. It just assumed that’s what you wanted because that’s what it had seen.

We are often trying to create systems where we can grade papers really well, write feedback really beautifully, but if the training data is inconsistent, then the AI will be skewed.”

Opportunities for EdTechs

Dr. Chris discusses the impact of AI on education, particularly in terms of how AI is changing the landscape of learning:

“AI has been around for a while, but it just wasn’t in the public consciousness. A lot of people still look back to the launch of ChatGPT as people really waking up and thinking ‘Wow, okay GPT.’

LLMs and what they can do, it’s really made people think about how education could be different. The COVID pandemic nudged people towards more digitally enabled forms of education.

A lot of education went online very rapidly, often in a hurry and not as well as it could have been. Vast amounts of lessons learned, however, some areas reverted back to how they had done it before.

The wave of AI coming after that has been really a second warning bell that actually there are fundamental things in terms of education that need to be different. Education at any level always has opportunities for making it better and better.

Education can be more personalised, it can be done more efficiently, it can be more fun than it necessarily has been. There are loads of opportunities to make things easier for the educators and the managers in the process.

We are mainly targeting universities right now, partly because of the scale and breadth, and the background that we have in that area. Lifelong learning opportunities, there’s a load of education providers and systems out there where we can harness the power of technology, AI, and subject matter experts.

Never cut humans out of the loop, they should be firmly in the loop.

Opportunities abound for us and other educators in this space to continually enhance how education is delivered, regardless of your age.”