Artificial intelligence delivered advances in the US space program and in medicine decades before it made headlines.
Now, AI is poised to bring major improvements to American education, tech entrepreneur Alex Galvagni said in an exclusive interview in New York City with Fox News Digital.
Galvagni is the CEO of Age of Learning, the California-based company behind popular classroom products like ABCmouse Early Learning Academy.
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“AI has been with us for a long time. Research has been going on since the 1950s,” he said.
In the 1990s, he said, “I worked at NASA doing AI research, and we applied it to very interesting, complex problems that weren’t so easily solved with traditional methods.”
Artificial intelligence is poised to bring major improvements to American education. (iStock)
During his years at NASA, Galvagni worked on the Space Shuttle program. He has held leadership roles with gaming companies and been at the forefront of advances in artificial intelligence.
Recent AI scenarios have many people worried about a future ruled by hyper-intelligent robots — but Galvagni said society has already benefited in many ways from the power of AI long before most people have even heard of it. sometimes for him.
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Artificial intelligence, he said, was used to help simulate the docking procedures of the spacecraft and to help balance the telescopes in many different conditions.
“We had a telescope built into a 747, and to be able to balance it while the plane was flying, we used AI and neural networks in particular,” he said.
Alex Galvagni, CEO of Age of Learning, told Fox News Digital that recent advances in artificial intelligence make it possible to provide individualized educational experiences to millions of children. (Sydney Borchers/Fox News Digital)
The same technology found its way into operating rooms in the 1990s to help with some of the most delicate medical procedures.
“We’ve used AI and neural networks, believe it or not, in brain surgery,” Galvagni said.
“We had a program with Stanford Medical Center in which we built a robotic device for brain surgery. It had sensors on the tip, and as the probe would go into the brain, the sensors would return information that was interpreted by neural networks,” he said. he.
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“The information was then given to the neurosurgeon, who would know what to do best at that point.”
Galvagni has worked with Age of Learning for the past 10 years.
He took on the role of chief executive in September.
A photograph taken by the STS-31 crew aboard the space shuttle Discovery shows the Hubble Space Telescope being deployed on April 25, 1990, from the cargo bay. (NASA/AFP via Getty Images)
Education is one of the next big frontiers, he believes, to benefit from advances in artificial intelligence technology.
“AI has been applied to all kinds of nonlinear, complex systems,” Galvagni said. “What’s happened in the last couple of years is that neural networks have been applied to language, and then you get big language models that help with language and natural speech.”
“AI can give kids the best possible content that we think they should be able to progress at the right pace.”
These advances can be harnessed to create essentially individualized educational models for every child in the classroom and millions around the country or the world.
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“AI can give kids the best possible content that we think they should be able to progress at the right pace,” he said.
“So this is adaptive content that personalizes the curriculum experience. And then we also have, again—by using large language models—the ability to provide very specific and useful feedback.”
A child is shown studying learning age programming at school. Artificial intelligence allows these products to provide personalized educational experiences for each child, company CEO Alex Galvagni told Fox News Digital. (Learning age)
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Galvagni said his company’s products are meant to help teachers — not replace them.
“We’ve used AI and neural networks, believe it or not, in brain surgery.”
“We have built [products] to really help teachers be successful in the classroom,” he said.
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“It’s very difficult when you have 30 children and they all have their own specific needs. With our software, you can make each child really focus on the areas they need to focus on.”
Alex Galvagni, center, CEO of Age of Learning, worked on artificial intelligence research for NASA in the 1990s. His company now uses AI in its educational products used by schools across the US (NASA/AFP via Getty Images; Fox News; iStock)
He added, “We also have dashboards and a lot of data that we give to teachers.”
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So teachers, he said, “can use that data to be able to schedule time with each individual child or create groups of children for specialized instruction. And we know that this model works very well.”