Could an AI pass the entrance exam for the University of Tokyo? Noriko Arai oversees a project that wants to find out.

Why you should listen

Noriko Arai is the program director of an AI challenge, Todai Robot Project, which asks the question: Can AI get into the University of Tokyo? The project aims to visualize both the possibilities and the limitation of current AI by setting a concrete goal: a software system that can pass university entrance exams. In 2015 and 2016, Todai Robot achieved top 20 percent in the exams, and passed more than 70 percent of the universities in Japan.

The inventor of Reading Skill Test, in 2017 Arai conducted a large-scale survey on reading skills of high and junior high school students with Japan's Ministry of Education. The results revealed that more than half of junior high school students fail to comprehend sentences sampled from their textbooks. Arai founded the Research Institute of Science for Education to elucidate why so many students fail to read and how she can support them.

Noriko Arai’s TED talk

More news and ideas from Noriko Arai

Live from TED2017

Our robotic overlords: The talks of Session 2 of TED2017

April 25, 2017

Are machines going to save or destroy us? It’s a question we’ve been grappling with since we first put 1s and 0s together to create computer code. And it feels like we’re no closer to answering it; machines are growing smarter by the day, and while they’re taking us to places we’ve never imagined, we […]

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