2020-2021学年度第9期总第727期
Detecting loneliness (P6)
北京市一零一中学 霍艺红
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1. What does AI stand for?
AI stands for artificial intelligence.

2. What can AI do?
AI has been used in the development of many things, such as driverless cars, household robots, surgical robots and robots programmed to play games.

Read for general idea
Read the passage and answer the following questions:
1. What is the result of the new study?
AI tools can predict levels of loneliness from a person’s speech with an accuracy rate of 94 percent.

2. Who led the study？
It was led by researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, US.  

3. Who participated in the study?
80 participants aged 66 to 94.

4. What tools are used in the study?
Natural language processing tools, including IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding software.

Read and explore
1. Read the passage again and draw a graphic organizer to show the process of the study.

2. How do you understand the sentence “Similar emotion analyses by humans would be open to bias (偏见), lack consistency, and require extensive (大量的) training to standardize.
It means if such analyses were done by humans, the results might be affected by people’s biases and would not be consistent. Besides, training would take a lot of time. This shows the advantage of using AI in the study.

3. What is the significance of this study?
Use of AI technology has further proved to be beneficial in scientific studies. Scientists will go on to use the speech data gained in this study to better understand aging.

Critical thinking
Discussion:
Although AI helps people in many ways, some people are still concerned about the negative effect it might have. What’s your opinion?

Homework
Please write a report about the study based on the information given in the passage, then talk about your report with someone.