Sahaj Vaidya's AI Tools Revolutionize the Modern Classroom

Titled ‘Unlocking Innovation: AI Tools for the Modern Classroom’ Sahaj Vaidya through her masterclass with SELIN Academy, an initiative by SELIN Club, dissects how AI tools can be used in classrooms to create effective student learning experiences. With technological advancements having a tighter chokehold on the human population, increasing interactions, and having more information at their disposal, the modern student needs more personalised learning and individual support than ever.

Vaidya highlights this need of the hour and presents strategies worth exploring to aid student learning, nudging educators to mold their teaching patterns into new forms. AI will allow them to personalise the syllabus according to a student’s need and provide real-time feedback, permitting more time and energy at their disposal to guide students and create an engaging environment for student discussion and debate.

She allows attendees to acknowledge the fact that computer systems now have the skills to provide output with a touch of human intelligence and reasoning, which educators can use to enhance the learning and teaching experience for students. Most of these tools can help to create a more engaging learning environment, streamline administrative tasks, serve diverse student requirements, and ultimately provide an improved learning environment. By using AI as a helping hand educators can optimise the way they approach the curriculum, administrative tasks and tackle repetitive tasks. Automation, insight extraction from data, and personalised recommendations are a few ways AI can help instructors, allowing them to save a significant chunk of time.

To back up this recommendation, we state a research from RAND. According to this study conducted by RAND, in the United States educators spend about 12 hours per week preparing and planning the lessons but this time can be sliced down by 20% using AI-driven solutions. So, along with providing tailored content for each student’s needs, efficiency with automated grading, administrative tasks, and accessibility, time can also be saved providing a better work-life balance. As an educator, it takes a lot off your plate, and Sahaj through her masterclass wants to show you how to do the same.

Alongside unpacking the benefits of AI with her you will also gain insight into using tools like Magic School AI, Curipod, Diffit for Teacherslearning, Chat Box Share Out to align teaching objectives in AI, Data Privacy, Ethical Considerations, and Student Privacy. Her years of experience are squeezed down into this masterclass making it a great space for discussions, understanding to leverage these tools ethically, and a wonderful addition to your teaching tools. 

Know Your Instructor

Sahaj Vaidya has played various roles as an AI enthusiast: doctoral researcher, healthcare innovator, content moderator, NIST fellow, and currently working as a policy analyst at WEDF where she drives Open Standard Framework for AI. Not only does she look into ways AI can be used as a tool to aid human life but she also advocates for human-machine interaction safety and ethical AI, establishing her as a pivotal force in shaping the future of AI. 

AI’s integration into healthcare can propel medical science in a beneficial direction for mankind and Vaidya’s understanding of this fact has fostered her association with the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA), with one of her notable projects involving AI-based designs with a patient-centric approach. Each patient's needs can be customised with this project, providing faster healthcare and easier treatment access.

With IEEE SA, the project involves designing AI-based solutions by keeping patients as the central focus of the healthcare ecosystem and providing interventions for easy treatment and fast access. Sahaj analyses the intricate difficulties and opportunities offered by incorporating elements of ethical AI in healthcare and has proposed a quadrant-based regulatory framework to ensure privacy, safety, and transparency. 

While working on this project Vaidya also developed a comprehensive framework for ethical governance catering to AI in healthcare to address the opportunities and challenges posed by AI in the healthcare industry in collaboration with the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). By proposing a holistic approach to ethical AI, Vaidya's work underscores the need for robust governance structures that can adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape of AI in healthcare. 

NJIT also acted as a basecamp for Vaidya in defining legislative lines for AI policies pertaining to transparency, explainability, and interpretability. Proper boundaries and guidelines for AI system operations ensure that decisions can be traced and understood. She has extended her research to peace technology, forming ethical frameworks for data-driven interventions, examining ethical frameworks such as Fair Information Practices and responsible AI principles, and providing a practical approach to the moral development of peace technologies.

She loves forming this amalgamation of technology and human systems but with the New Jersey Institute of Technology, she is addressing the legislative and ethical issues associated with AI, ensuring a safe space is created for everyone in this collaboration. The work majorly focused on communicative visualisation to decode scientific charts, aiming to develop an understanding of the bridge between information perception and visual representation, making better design choices for scientific communication. She developed a fact-evidence reasoning framework (FaEvR) to decode scientific charts (communicative visualizations) that categorised evidence and facts presented in the chart increasing the ease of chart interpretability. Her comprehensive examination of ethical frameworks including Fair Information Practices, and exploring real-world case studies, shows her passion for the ethical development of all data-driven technologies and deploying AI for social good. 

In collaboration with Open Ethics, Vaidya worked with OEXP or Open Explainability Protocol to establish a standard approach for autonomous systems to convey outputs. This standardised approach will allow AI systems to interact better with individuals creating space for enhanced debugging opportunities, model improvement, and forming an understanding of data that is utilised in the decision-making process, allowing others to understand autonomous system behaviour.

Vaidya, with her colleagues, has also scrapped the surface of misinformation circulation on social media platforms like Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube, intending to improve content moderation on these platforms. In the research, they explored how visual analytics can augment the performance of content moderators, allowing them to design new technologies to deal with the complexities of the vast ocean of content online.

At the World Economic Development Forum (WEDF) Vadiya’s leadership ability and policy analysis skills have influenced AI’s role in shaping governance and she focused on promoting open standards for AI, highlighting the need for responsible and ethical and aligning it with global standards. 

Apart from her vast research endeavors, Vaidya is dedicated to community building and education and actively engages with educators to skill transfer and nudge educators to incorporate AI in their classrooms. Her career serves as a testament to the fact that AI’s involvement in societal tasks can be done responsibly and ethically, spanning content moderation, healthcare, and education by her alone. There is vast potential in AI, especially when it is guided by principles of transparency, accountability, and inclusivity.