Watson-powered Apps during COVID-19
Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity? — Cesar Chavez
For the past two semesters, we have been running a course project called Innovation Farm, which involves undergraduate students at the College of Business at San Jose State University to leverage IBM Watson to created gamified startups to address important social issues in the Silicon Valley, such as homelessness, housing, food insecurity, traffic, parking, public transportation. The final pitch competition among the “startup” teams has always been the most rewarding and mind-blowing moments to look forward to in every semester, where students present their ideas in front of external judges.
This semester is destined to be special for the Innovation Farm project, not only because it has been upgraded to a new course about Digital Innovation, but also because we are all facing an unprecedented challenging time during COVID-19. Students had started working on Watson-powered Android apps for social issues in January, but our students have taken on a new challenge since our class moved online in mid March, and that is:
Creating Watson-powered Android apps to address important social issues during COVID-19.
Needless to say, every individual and every single aspect of the society are greatly impacted by the pandemic. No matter which social issue our students had been working on (financial insecurity, health, transportation, environment, education, etc), they adapted swiftly to the context of COVID-19.
With all the support from our IBM friends and SJSU-IBM Initiative, we are witnessing impressive creativity from our students and encouraging them to submit their solutions to this year’s IBM Call for Code with one track focusing on COVID-19.
As usual, I’m looking forward to yet another (but virtual) pitch day on April 30 to see how our students leverage Watson to address social issues during COVID-19. Moreover, what I’m even more looking forward to, might be, how developing AI powered solutions might help draw the goodness and the best out of our own students and serve humanity.
Stay tuned!
