Data Innovation Lead, English Schools Foundation
Alexey Popov is the Data Innovation Lead at English Schools Foundation (ESF) in Hong Kong.
Prior to this role he had 15 years of experience as a teacher and educator. He taught IB Psychology and Theory of Knowledge in Russia, India and Hong Kong. He has been involved with the IB educator network as an examiner, workshop leader, curriculum developer and textbook author. He has published textbooks for IB Theory of knowledge (Themantic Education) and IB Psychology (Oxford University Press). He holds two Master's degrees (linguistics and psychology) and a PhD in Educational psychology.
Alexey is passionate about data analytics and data science and he is keen to bring the latest developments in data science into education. He implemented a number of data projects in the past including developing psychometric tests for business and education, designing predictive models and building automated solutions to support decision-making under uncertainty. He is a self-taught data scientist with a working knowledge of Python and R.
He lives in Hong Kong with his wife Daria and a 6-year-old daughter Mia.
This session will explore the point where education intersects technology, psychology and philosophy of mind. We will speak about artificial intelligence of course, but the focus will be reversed. What do recent advances in AI teach us about the nature of human intelligence? How exactly is it different from machines? What does it mean for education?
Turing test, the hard problem of consciousness, theory of mind and emergent properties will be thrown in the mix with semantic AI, personalised learning and cognitive biases. We will not achieve any answers, but we will try to clearly formulate the crucial questions.
I will explore the current limitations of AI in education and explain why these limitations are not likely to go away in the foreseeable future. I will touch upon several projects that we have implemented in ESF that support this. But the focus of the session will be on bigger questions: What is the human mind? How does it develop? What role does education play in it? What is uniquely human in this process and what forms could a symbiosis with machines take?