MOSCOW, Oct. 28. /TASS/. The introduction of artificial intelligence technologies into engineering educational programs at universities will allow students to get up to speed on the tasks at hand, for example, thanks to the skill of working with non-standard randomly generated tasks. After graduation such specialists can get into work projects 15% to 30 % faster than others, Acting Rector of Tomsk Polytechnic University Dmitry Sednev said Thursday at an all-Russian scientific conference "Vector of the Future," organized by Gazprom Neft.

"What’s important is that artificial intelligence technologies shorten the adaptation period a student who’s fresh out of the university needs when joining a project or generally starting work. Different tools can work, but I really like the example given by our domestic company Innopraktika. It develops a large number of virtual and augmented reality technologies with feedback mechanisms and tasks that are generated according to specially mapped algorithms. And with such preparation, the time needed to fully engage in a project is shortened from 15% to 32%. If you translate this into the financial costs of companies which require to finish training graduates, it will be a serious figure," said Sednev.

He added, citing foreign scientists, that university teachers now spend up to 50% of their time preparing for classes, as well as administrative work. Creating assistants with artificial intelligence will allow to reduce the burden a teacher has to face and free up time to be more involved in working with students, creating individual learning trajectories. The AI would be almost as good as a live human being in organizational work.

"Colleagues at the University of Georgia replaced the three tutors who accompanied the course with a chatbot. The number of messages which received a response increased by 30%. Why? Access to answers and the speed of these responses was on a completely different level, response accuracy was about 97%, and the survey showed that about 93% of students didn't realize they weren't communicating with a live tutor," said Sednev.

In addition, using AI to assess a student's level of knowledge makes it possible to assess with 97% accuracy whether he or she knows the subject and will pass the final exam just three weeks after the start of training, which will also make it possible to adjust his training program in case he fails.

Tomsk Polytechnic University Initiative

Previously, Tomsk Polytechnic Institute came up with the initiative to create a consortium of "New Engineering Education of Russia," which was supported by the leading technical universities. This initiative has already been supported by Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, National University of Science and Technology, Far Eastern Federal University, Kazan National Research Technical University, and Novosibirsk State Technical University. The consortium will allow sharing best practices, making educational and research infrastructures more open to each other, creating joint educational programs and social projects, and increasing the volume of academic mobility between Russian engineering universities.