AI-Driven Private School

An AI-driven private school, called Alpha School, is opening a Northern Virginia campus this fall, charging up to $65,000 annually. Students will spend two hours daily on academics via adaptive apps like IXL, then focus on life skills and workshops.

Instead of teachers, AI guides oversee learning and activities. Backed by billionaire investors, Alpha is expanding to 12 campuses nationwide while seeking approval to adapt its model in charter schools.

More information:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/08/26/alpha-school-virginia-ai-education/

Smartphone Audio Guide for Visual Impaired

Tactile paving for people with visual impairments in Japan has recently been enhanced with audio guidance, as the developers of the technology aim to improve the lives of people with partial sight and assist sighted tourists. The new braille blocks are marked with black stickers in special patterns. By scanning the coded blocks with a smartphone camera and app, users can listen to audio information about the location and its surroundings. The system was jointly developed by the laboratory of Kanazawa Institute of Technology and Tokyo-based W&M systems LLC.

Those behind the technology hope it can also be made available to tourists and foreigners as they walk the streets of Japan, whether they are sighted or not. The special braille blocks were first introduced in Kanazawa, central Japan, in 2019 and have since been installed in other areas, appearing at train stations, pedestrian streets and public offices in 10 prefectures, including Tokyo and Osaka, as of April. The developers plan to make the system available in multiple languages and are considering enabling it to answer questions by incorporating generative artificial intelligence capabilities.

More information:

https://japantoday.com/category/national/speaking-tactile-sidewalks-enrich-lives-of-visually-impaired

Generated Video Teaches Robots

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers developed a video generation model to produce demonstration videos to teach robots to perform specific tasks. Users provide a text command and an image of the current scene to produce a demonstration video tailored to the robot's specific task and environment, with no additional training required. RIGVid's success rate across tasks was 85%, outperforming other robot imitation methods.

RIGVid’s approach for extracting an object’s motion from a generated video, based on model-based six DoF object pose tracking, also outperformed alternative methods for trajectory extraction using optical flow and sparse keypoints. The improvement was apparent on challenging tasks, like sweeping dirt or placing a thin spatula into a pan, where the other methods struggled with object occlusion.

More information:

https://siebelschool.illinois.edu/news/RIGVid

AI in Ancient Weaving Style

Hironori Fukuoka of Fukuoka Weaving in Kyoto, Japan, is turning to AI and Sony Computer Science Laboratories to help keep the ancient Nishijinori kimono-weaving technique alive, using the technology as a collaborator.

Nishijinori's repetitive and geometric patterns are conducive to digital translations, and Fukuoka views AI as useful in identifying new motifs to define the angular lines of traditional patterns.

More information:

https://apnews.com/article/japan-kyoto-ai-nishijinori-tradition-kimono-6c95395a5197ce3dd97b87afa6ac5cc7

Fully Autonomous Farm

Farms are moving toward full autonomy thanks to advances in AI, robotics, and digital tools. High costs and the lack of broadband Internet in rural areas, however, pose major obstacles.

Technologies being deployed on farms include autonomous tractors, robots and drones capable of picking fragile fruits, sensors that provide soil analysis, virtual fences to rein in livestock, and remote sensing and image analytics tools.

More information:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/autonomous-farming-ai-95657bd1

Interactive Media for Cultural Heritage

Recently, the latest edited book I co-authored with colleagues from CYENS – Centre of Excellence and the University of Cyprus was published by Springer Series on Cultural Computing. The book is entitled ‘Interactive Media for Cultural Heritage’ and presents the full range of interactive media technologies and their applications in Digital Cultural Heritage. It offers a forum for interaction and collaboration among the interactive media and cultural heritage research communities.

The aim of this book is to provide a point of reference for the latest advancements in the different fields of interactive media applied in Digital Cultural Heritage research, ranging from visual data acquisition, classification, analysis and synthesis, 3D modelling and reconstruction, to new forms of interactive media presentation, visualization and immersive experience provision via extended reality, collaborative spaces, serious games and digital storytelling.

More information:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-61018-9

AI Changes Education

Artificial intelligence tools are changing the teaching profession as educators use them to help write quizzes and worksheets, design lessons, assist with grading and reduce paperwork. By freeing up their time, many say technology has made them better at their jobs. A poll released Wednesday by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation found 6 in 10 U.S. teachers working in K-12 public schools used AI tools for their work over the past school year, with heavier use among high school educators and early-career teachers. It surveyed more than 2,000 teachers nationwide in April.

Respondents who use AI tools weekly estimate they save them about six hours a week, suggesting the technology could help alleviate teacher burnout, said Gallup research consultant Andrea Malek Ash, who authored the report. As schools navigate concerns over student abuse of the technology, some are also introducing guidelines and training for educators so teachers are aware of avoiding shortcuts that shortchange students. About 8 in 10 teachers who use AI tools say it saves them time on work tasks like making worksheets, assessments, quizzes or on administrative work.

More information:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-chatgpt-teacher-chatbot-b1630bc549e9044d1e3bbcc060fb422c