The impact of AI-teachers on the human teachers who use them in schools

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The project continued with investigations on the usefulness of AI tools adopted by or designed for teachers. There are three lines of research which report achievements:1. The study surveyed Japanese schoolteachers of English language who, with the scope of teaching pronunciation, adopted an AI tool which uses machine learning algorithms to analyse, and natural language processing techniques to understand users' speech. Findings show that such teaching tool not only provides a better teaching-learning experience, but may render traditional English pronunciation teaching techniques obsolete.2. Investigation on teachers' need to appraise student affect and their desire to use facial emotion recognition (FER) AI to complement their natural methods yielded positive results.3. The developed FER application was improved to allow detection of deviations from default student emotional state. Emotions are now modelled in terms of valence (positive/negative nature of emotion) and arousal (emotion intensity) by training a multi-task convolutional neural network, in order to create a continuous spectrum of emotional experiences, rather than simply categorising emotions into discrete classes (happy, neutral, sad etc.), as it did before.