The moment has come to fully embrace the potential of artificial intelligence in education. With the collaboration of minds, we can embark on a limitless journey of personalized learning, leading to endless possibilities in the future. In this enlightening discussion, our guest is the visionary Emiliano De Laurentiis, CEO of Knowledge Avatars, a groundbreaking company revolutionizing the field of education through the power of artificial intelligence. Emiliano shares his journey, discovering how his passion for artificial intelligence propelled him to the forefront of this cutting-edge industry. Throughout this episode, Emilio discusses the incredible potential of Knowledge Avatars’ innovative tutoring abilities, which harness the capabilities of artificial intelligence to enhance our learning experiences. Emiliano elucidates the seamless integration of AI into education, providing personalized and adaptive learning environments that cater to individual needs and foster deep comprehension. He shares how AI-powered technologies are changing the way teachers teach, making education more engaging and exciting for learners of any age. With these advancements, the possibilities for educational opportunities have become endless. Tune in and discover the transformative role AI is playing in reshaping the future of education.

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The Future Of Education With Emilliano De Laurentiis

In this episode, we have Emiliano De Laurentiis, who is joining us and talking about artificial intelligence. He is a leader in artificial intelligence as well as the CEO of Knowledge Avatars™, which allows us to learn using artificial intelligence. Welcome. Tell us a little bit about how you got into artificial intelligence.

Thank you for having me on your show. I appreciate the offer. This was many years ago. This is in the ‘80s. Even before graduate school, I was studying Cognitive Sciences. That was my undergraduate work. When I was in graduate work, we were working on a medical diagnosis already. I was at McGill University. We were developing expert systems and AI systems that would help diagnose medical problems. That was part of one of the projects I was working on. We started looking at how to use AI in education.

My graduate work was in Educational Psychology and Counseling, but my hobby was technology. I was self-taught. My first programming language was Fortran. That was not self-taught, but my first self-taught language was BASIC. It went on from there. I saw the future. I saw that there was an intersection of pedagogy, technology, and psychology. I was wondering, “How can we put this together?”

After I graduated with my Master’s in Educational Psychology, I brought my hobby together with my academic experience and started building a company. My first company was in 1981. We had 55 employees developing educational software. We developed a chatbot. We had probably one of the first chatbots used in education in the early ‘80s. It was published by Francis Hall all over the world. I got a call from a teacher in India a couple of summers ago. He said he is still using some of my software. I thought that was pretty cool.

Chatbots are huge these days. Everybody thinks about ChatGPT. It is going to be an easy process to incorporate that into our daily lives. What I get excited about, and what I want to happen, is artificial general intelligence, where you have the ability to talk to this thing similarly like a human being. It is seamless in the same way that Alexa has now become seamless in our daily lives. When I want to know a question, I say, “Alexa, what time is it? What is the weather outside?” Some people use Google and Siri.

 

 

Don’t say the words because all my lights will go off.

That has easily permeated the public consciousness, and I can’t wait. It is to the point where I can have a conversation with that artificial intelligence. How far do you think that we are away from that?

It is not easy. If you think of it, Siri was introduced several years ago. Apple put together a little concept video in 1987. That was an AI as an assistant. Siri is what they were thinking about in 1987. That was before 1987 because that is when they released that video. It takes a long time for ideas to go from academia to the mainstream. Siri took a long time for it to become ubiquitous. How do we use things like Siri? We mainly use it for turning on the lights, reminders, timers, and things of that sort. We don’t have a conversation with the AI.

That is coming. People are all excited about ChatGPT, but it doesn’t know anything. What it is good at is it is good at simulating a good conversation. Although it can give you some good answers, you have to fact-check it because it will give you an answer that sounds perfectly fine but is bogus. To answer your question, when are we going to get to a true AI that understands what you are talking about and keeps it in context? That is a good question. It is a question that I can’t say I have the answer to.

ChatGPT doesn’t know anything. What it is good at is simulating a good conversation.

Some people fear that we are going to get to that point. Elon Musk has mentioned that we may get to that point in the next 10 to 20 years. He fears it because, at that point, AI may decide that humans are not useful. All of the AI now and in the future is going to be based on human knowledge. We, humans, have created these things. If humans stopped creating, what would happen? The AI becomes stagnant unless the AI starts becoming creative.

I’m not worried about the stagnation or any of the negative effects, and maybe that is naive. I’m most excited about what AI can do for me. When I have a train of thought, I say, “I want to book a flight to Aruba and take my family on vacation. Alexa, Siri, or Google, can you check my calendar? What is the best flight?” I’m going down a train of thought with the ability to control research through my voice. If we wanted to do that, we would have to go on three different websites. We would have to crosscheck this. I would have to email the people in my office. I would have to do all these things.

Research is something that artificial intelligence would be good at, and the ability to balance multiple tasks. When I think of artificial intelligence, that is what I talk about. Lastly, not mimicking conversation, but having a conversation with that AI. Having a great personal assistant that is equivalent to a human being would be good for many people. I look at that as around the corner. Is that accurate, or is that not accurate?

It is accurate on myself. My latest theme is to have a symbiotic relationship with AI. The AI enhances you. Steve Jobs famously said, “People use the computer to empower their brain and create things. They use TV to be passive and to turn off their brain. They turn on their brain with computers.” That is what we can do. Nowadays, AI can help you do that.

There is one issue that I’m encountering myself, which is many people are used to being those passive absorbers of information that they don’t know how to be Socratic anymore. People can be Socratic with them and ask questions. I’m finding that there are a lot of students who don’t know what to ask. They don’t have that curiosity that you would think that they would have. Those critical thinking skills are missing. I’m worried about that. It is going to be a big shift in how education works with AI.

What happens when students are no longer passive? How will we get them to not be passive? The information is going to a bunch of students. That is how education still is now. It is a lecture transmitting information to a bunch of students. Whether that lecture is on the computers or lecture hall, that still is the basic model that we have.

I hope that AI has the ability to do that, which is to learn through conversation, which is the way that the majority of the human race learns. That is how we transmitted information before there was written knowledge. That is how we learned as a species for a long time. If I could have a conversation with artificial intelligence that would mimic how we learned in the past, which is something that I think is that for us to achieve symbiosis, we have to understand ourselves. I like the word that you said, “Symbiosis.” That is the best outcome for artificial intelligence.

Everybody has negative thoughts about artificial intelligence. When we talk about science fiction, think about how many bad artificial intelligence there is. When you talk about artificial intelligence, the first thing that people think of is a bad thing when it comes to science fiction. When I think about artificial intelligence, I think about people like Commander Data from Star Trek. In the Green Lantern comics, there is an artificial intelligence that becomes Green Lantern, which is this superhero that has the ability to save lives and do all these things. I follow a lot of science fiction.

One of the great things about science fiction is it gives us interesting ideas for the future and how we can go. The artificial intelligence I see in science fiction is a symbiosis that allows us to become more than what we are now. That is something that is exciting to me. When I look at all of the things that we have learned in the past several years, I get hopeful for my children. There are many negative aspects of technology, but in general, we are continuing to get better at all of the things that we’ve put our en effort and energy into.

When I look at artificial intelligence, one of the other things that I want to do is the ability to teach my children. We are going to have children that are able to have access to information more than ever before. If we can have artificial intelligence teach them through conversation, they could be more intelligent than any other generation that we have had in the past. That is something that I get excited about. Let’s take a sidetrack on that and tell me. When you think about pedagogy and about the way that we are going to teach our children in the future, how is artificial intelligence play a role in that?

There is a lot of talk about ChatGPT and how students are using it to cheat. People are all worried about it. I’m saying, “What is there to be worried about?” The problem is not the student. The problem is the educational system. The educational system was designed to mass educate people. That is changing. AI makes it possible for you to have individual tutors.

Imagine if every student has their own tutor. That is exciting. Every student comes to education with different backgrounds, spaces, and emotional structures. Most of the educational problems the students have to do with emotional health if they are overly stressed is they are not ready to learn. An AI can help them meet those knowledge and emotional gaps. They can have a conversation with the AI about what they need right now. I need to have this information about history, geography, or math, especially with young students. We still have to have some structure. The nature of that learning is going to be different.

 

 

Since ChatGPT became public, teachers have been asking me, “What do we do? How do we teach now?” I say, “That is not the question. It is not how you teach. What is the nature of what you are doing? Why are students cheating in the first place? Why are they there? Are they there for an A grade? Do you want to have a student who doesn’t understand the content?” A lot of education is learning on a deadline. The reason students want to achieve is because they are overwhelmed. They don’t have the time to learn the content properly.

There is a lot of debate about how terrible the schooling system is. What are your thoughts on the best way to teach people? You alluded to the Socratic method earlier. That is something that has been shown to drill into concepts. At least, that is how I was taught in medical school. When we would have conversations about a patient, our attendings would ask us questions and go down these thought processes so we could learn based on their questions. What about you? What do you feel is the model? How is your AI teaching your students?

The model is important. I built a pedagogical model called FEED. It is an acronym for Feedback, Experiences, Examples, and Definitions. If you look at those four things, science and education have shown that those are the four things. If you want to learn any concept, whatever it is, how to identify your heart, how to do a formula, a definition is a generalization. That is the final goal.

You want to be able to take that concept and understand that no matter which context you are in like if you have this cup, you want to be able to identify that as a cup no matter what the shape of the cup. That is a generalization. Samples are many different cups. Show me many different cups of different shapes with handles and without handles. These are all cups. What I’m talking about is it is exactly how machine learning works. Have an experience where you need to identify cups to prove to yourself that you have learned something.

It is the immediate feedback that you get that tells you, “Yes, that is a cup. It is not a cup.” That model works no matter what you are teaching. That is based on the DNA of our bots. It is an important element because a lot of people don’t know how to teach. One of my first jobs at the Center for Teaching and Learning Services at McGill University was to improve the teaching of the professors there because the professors are not teachers. They are there to do research. They are experts in their field.

The AI model works no matter what you’re teaching, no matter what.

Publish or perish is a term that everybody hears about. To become a professor and get funding, you have to research and get grants. That tends to be the focus of what a professor’s career is about, not the actual teaching. I get it. I was being facetious.

Some schools focus on teaching, and some schools focus on research. If they focus on research, they don’t care how the teaching happens.

Coming back to the FEED concept, for clarification, that is how you teach your bots. Is that also how you teach your students?

That is how the bots teach the students. For every content, they have examples, definitions, and experiences, or you have a conversation with a bot about whatever topic.

What is the earliest age range the method works? When I think of teaching styles, I think of the Montessori method. That is a teaching style. It is something they start as soon as the kid can walk. There are schools that thought that the Montessori method was a way that you could do it up until high school. Does the FEED concept work for all levels? When does it start becoming effective?

The pedagogy model itself is good for any age group. The question is, “What information do we present? What videos, examples, or activities?” For example, we partner with different organizations to develop educational products. One of the companies I’m partnering with is developing an escape room in virtual reality. This is for middle school. The first product is going to be, “Where is India in the Middle East?”

It teaches geography too. That is awesome.

You have to answer a lot of questions. You have to solve these puzzles to go from one room to another, like an escape room. Who is the game master? How can we make this scalable? The game master is one of our knowledge avatar boxes. It answers questions and acts as the game master to help students learn what they need to learn to be able to go from one room to another room.

That tapping into our innate learning models as human being is important. One of the things that we used to teach people is geography through understanding things in relationship to each other in three dimensions. I can look at a map and say, “India is next to Pakistan. It is also next to Bangladesh.” For me, that is two-dimensional. If I fly there and visit Pakistan and Bangladesh, it would be a different concept. The people that grew up and lived in Europe can pick out all of the states on all the countries on a map.

 

 

I might have trouble with that because I grew up in America, but I can point out all the states in the US because I have gone around the US. Some people that are in the US that never leave their town may never do that because of that experience and trip. It is the same way that when we were based human species, we were telling people how to find the best hunting grounds or to find the best berries to eat. That is something that is ingrained in our consciousness. That is one of the things that virtual reality will be great for so you can make those trips virtually. Artificial intelligence is sharp.

If you go into elementary school, what we want there are more physical bots to get the kids away from the two-dimensional screen. We do more VR, but we also get more physical bots. We can incorporate AI and the bots and have kids interact with those. In the early days of technology, I used to work with Logo. I don’t know if you are familiar. It is a language that was designed to give students a constructive experience.

They had a robot, which was a turtle, and the turtle had a pen in its belly. You could program your computer, which in those days was not wireless, but it was connected with a long wire. You could program that robot to draw on the floor. You put the paper on the floor, and it would make these geographic drawings. You would learn about circles and triangles but not learning about geography. They are learning about how to program and how to do critical thinking. That was all Seymour Papert’s work. That was from MIT. I learned the Language Logo on the mini-computer those days, which is the size of a refrigerator, and from Logo Systems International, which is a company that was based in Montreal, originally MIT in Cambridge.

That is where I live. Tell me more about this guy. What was he teaching?

He was an educational psychologist. I can’t remember exactly which department he worked at. He developed the concept of constructivism, which means that you create things, and you learn by creating. Logo Language was the main system. After graduate school, I used to teach Logo and similar languages to schools. I was living in Montreal. I was teaching in the Montreal area.

The beauty of that is that with a simple enough language that would be young kids, we are talking about elementary school, could learn how to program. That is critical thinking. It requires a lot of problem-solving. Nowadays, there is a language called Snap, which is based on the concept of Logos. It is a simpler language. It is like Lego blocks. You put together these Lego blocks, and that is how you program.

Snap is run out of Berkeley in California. With Snap, you can program bots, but you can program things on the internet or your computer. The idea of Snap is by doing, students are learning critical thinking skills, but they are also learning about the subjects. If you are trying to program something having to do with geography, you have to learn about geography. Unfortunately, it seems that that model is in decline. I was at a conference in Montreal. I met the president of Logo Systems. They are shutting down.

When you are talking about these systems, these are programming models. Is it pedagogy or pedagogical?

It is pedagogy. In FEED, one of the Es is Experiences. If I show you what a cup is, that is an example. If I describe a cup, the vessel with a handle, that is the definition. If I ask you to draw me a cup, that is an experience. If I ask you to program a robot to draw a cup, that is also an experience. If I ask you to take some pottery and make me a cup, that is also an experience. The feedback is the teacher saying, “That is a good cup. That is really a cup.” Saying, “No, that doesn’t look like a cup. That looks more like a glass to me or a chalice. This is what a cup should look like.” That is the model of education that works no matter what you are teaching.

What we are talking about with the Logo, for example, programming, is an experience. You still have to teach something. We used to give students tasks such as developing things. They say, “What is that? What is it supposed to look like? How do we represent that mathematically? How are we going to program that?”

We had to learn certain things in the Language Logo, such as recursion. We had to learn these concepts because, with that programming, you are doing the same thing over again. That is recursion. These are high-level concepts that students were learning. We are talking about elementary school students. Fifth-grade or fourth grade could learn some high-level concepts. I was teaching my son with stuff like that when he was in third or fourth grade. The schools were not teaching him that. He is not a computer scientist. I think he is something worth it.

Do you have any kids at all?

Yes.

How did you teach him when he was young?

He had a lot of examples of Lego. Lego was a great tool for us because every student should be able to manipulate the real world in three dimensions. We also did robot programming with other forms of 2D programming. He was immersed in the world of math, science, and programming from early on.

I have a daughter myself. I am excited for her to have a friend that is a robot. She is asking many questions. She is pointing out many things. I can’t keep up with her curiosity. Having somebody that has an inexhaustible ability to give her the information she needs would make her more intelligent than I think that I wouldn’t have the ability to be at that age.

We are always surprised, me and my wife, about how much she is able to absorb and how much she’s able to pick up on. That is from a lot of time spent doing nothing, which is important. On the same token, I feel like I’m the limiting step. I can’t give her the information at the pace that she is able to take it in. If we have a robot or some other thing that is able to give that to her at her pace, that is going to be an incredible opportunity for the human race. Every child would have this ability to maximize their potential.

We are talking about how a lot of students nowadays are passive in their absorption of information. They are not Socratic. They don’t question. That is what this our educational system has been doing to students. It has been setting them up to be more passive recipients of information rather than active learners.

 

 

Your child is an active learner. We are such a dominant species because we are not the most intelligent species, but we are curious. Someone asks me questions sometimes, like, “Why do we want to go to space? We have many problems on earth.” No, it is because it is part of the human species. It is part of our nature to want to explore and learn. If you have that questions because you have lost your sense of curiosity of wanting to learn and explore, that is the human condition.

I hear that all the time, “Why do I have to know this?” Every time I hear that from the young doctors that I work with, it kills me inside. It is such a foreign concept. I wish that I could know everything. The limit for me is not the knowledge. The limit for me is my own capacity to digest it all. I can’t remember everything. I can’t read 24 hours a day, but I want to learn as much as possible. That is something that artificial intelligence would be able to feed us whenever we want it.

How many times are you in the car, you think of something, and you want to go down this thought process? You are in the car. You can’t indulge in that. If Emiliano and I were in the car together, I would sit here and have the same conversation that we are having now. I would pick your brain about all the different things that you know about artificial intelligence that I don’t. I don’t have you in my car all the time. That is a limiting step for me. I’m limited by that.

If I were to put on a podcast or listen to a book on tape, that is passive information, or that is me absorbing passively. Even when I’m listening to that book or listening to a podcast, I have my own questions that I want to know about the person who might not ask. I look forward to that day when, even for myself, I can learn through the advent of artificial intelligence.

Many years ago, we were already talking about implanting chips in our brains to enhance our brains’ capabilities, maybe as memory chips. The internet didn’t exist yet. People weren’t writing about the internet. That statement in itself is amazing to think that the internet did not exist several years ago. Now, the internet represents the sum of human knowledge. That is what AI can do. AI can represent the sum of human knowledge and teach it to you, and you have to be responsible. There is a lot of false information and unreliable information. How do we sort through all that? That is why you have to have the bots that you are working with.

The truth always wins out. One of the things that you said that is powerful is the internet was developed however many years ago, and now it is a permanent thing. It is something that some people consider to be a right. Here in Cambridge, they are talking about how the internet is a right. That is permeated through human consciousness and human society. That is what I think artificial intelligence will do.

The internet was not even part of a lot of science fiction. It was only Jules Verne who had an AI story where he had something that was similar to an ATM. He had an ATM where he could access information. This concept of the internet did not exist in science fiction until the internet started.

The concept of the internet was not pervasive or did not exist in science fiction. Until we actually the internet.

I look at science fiction as a guidepost, but for us, reality is becoming science fiction. It is outpacing science fiction. There are many different things that we don’t even know the repercussions of until it comes around. That is why there is a lot of negative talk about AI. Doomsday sayers don’t realize that there could be a lot of benefits to this. Those repercussions can be positive. Let’s have a quick detour on science fiction. You have alluded to Jules Verne. When you think about artificial intelligence, what is the science fiction that you think that people should think about so that they get a hopeful view of how this thing is going to play out?

I was particularly inspired by the Isaac Asimov Robot series. They have the three laws of robotics. They have some issues and problems had to be solved. For the most part, the robots were companions. In some cases, they were superior to humans. They had to hide from humans because of their superior nature. They were also empathetic. It was a positive representation of robots and AI. It was balanced. It wasn’t all bad.

Terminator series is what everybody thinks of when they think about artificial intelligence.

They may need to blame Mary Shelley for Frankenstein.

The popularity of the Terminator series has done a lot of negative talk about AI. There are problems. It could be an existential threat, but so could nuclear energy. Science, in general, is a tool. That tool could be used for positive or negative. Especially these days, we are so skeptical about technology. Social media was a poorly designed concept. It has affected us negatively on many levels throughout society. For the most part, the majority of technology, in my opinion, has been positive. Air conditioning and sanitation have changed the world. There are many different amazing technologies that have improved society.

This show is changing the world. I’m here in New York State, and you are in Massachusetts. We can talk face-to-face and communicate this way. This has become ubiquitous since COVID. There was a need. Before that, I was struggling to get people to meet with me by video. In general, business people didn’t want to meet with a video camera. They wanted to have a regular phone call or meet face-to-face. Since COVID, people have changed their attitude about that.

I have conversations with my mother every week face-to-face with Hannah during COVID. They emotionally helped to keep her healthy. She was under surgery during COVID but was able to recover a lot faster because we had these conversations. She talks to people all over the world. All she needs is an iPad.

I had this other guy. He was a social scientist. He was talking about the lack of face-to-face communication as a problem. Nowadays, you have all of this teleconferencing, and you still need that component in your life, which I tend to agree with. They are not mutually exclusive. We did not have those things that you were talking about available to us several years ago.

That is a benefit. I don’t think that it takes away the ability for me to contact my distant relatives on my day-to-day. I had a dinner party. We had a great conversation. I got that face-to-face ability. I was doing this, but with human beings and shared interactions, you can still have that, but you can also expand your communication radius. You can talk with people halfway across the world.

There is a lot to be said. The human touch is extremely important. There was a time when people communicated by voice and no visual contact. Now you can see the other person’s eyes and facial expressions.

You were limited to a landline. You were limited to one place where you had to pick up the phone. It is great to remember how far we have come.

Technology has, for the most part, improved the theme and the quality of our lives. AI will do the same. It is already doing the same. You will have a lot of negative stories like, “These people have faked this person’s face. They faked this person’s music.” We need some checks and balances. We need some regulations.

The bots that I create have some of these checks and balances. If somebody tries to swear at them, they will respond with, “This is inappropriate.” Other kinds of inappropriate talk, whether it is violence or sex, will say the same thing because we are an educational organization. It will come back and say, “This is inappropriate.” We explicitly program so that the bot does respond to those kinds of messages rather than allowing it to go crazy. We need some of these checks and balances in a lot of our technologies as we do with nuclear power.

Whenever a new technology comes out, we should think about, “How is this going to affect us? How do we make sure that the negative aspects don’t affect us going forward?” We are coming close to the end of our time together. I did want to end with something that I normally do with all my guests. I have three questions that I thought of as we were talking. I want to get an expert opinion.

We talked a little bit about science fiction and artificial intelligence. When you think about artificial intelligence and science fiction, what is a book other than Isaac Asimov’s Robot series that you would recommend to someone to read to get an idea of what you hope that artificial intelligence is able to achieve?

All of the Robot series are murder mysteries but with robots as characters in the stories. That is what is good. I have an answer to your question now that I’ve given three more seconds of thought. I think everybody should read Frankenstein. Frankenstein is a tortured creation. The story is not one-sided. It was looking at it from the perspective of the creation itself of the robot.

I’m going to give you my answer now, which is I would recommend that people read The Vision series, which is a comic book created by Tom King. It is beautiful. When I think of the benefits of artificial intelligence, I think about Vision from the Avengers that is on the side of life. He has the ability to look at human beings and look at something as this is something that should be treasured and protected. We want to make sure that we help that species thrive. That is my answer.

The second question I wanted to ask you is this. You are an expert in learning development. This is a personal question. I’m putting my kid into preschool. The more that I read about Montessori, the more I get interested in it. How do you feel about Montessori? Is that something that is good or bad? How do you feel about that?

I will give you a general answer to that. I looked into it to some degree for my own child. I’m not completely up to date with Montessori. I wouldn’t want to give you a specific recommendation. On the other hand, what is important in education? I have been involved with private schools. I have been both a teacher there and a parent on the board.

Often, the teachers from the pool go to the pool and vice versa. They are the same teachers. What is the quality of the needs that the school specials? What it is, for the most part, is the class size and dedication of the teachers to the students to help the students with their specific problems because everybody is different.

If Montessori is doing that for your child, that is a good thing. Most private schools do have a smaller student-teacher ratio. That is important. It is a matter of logic. If you have too many students, you can’t deal with them. You can’t deal with all the individual needs of those students. You are going to be broadcasting more rather than interacting more at the Socratic level. Montessori is focused more on the individual needs of the student.

That is good information that you should focus on the quality of teachers and the student-to-teacher ratio as opposed to a certain model of learning, which is interesting. That is a good thing to know. The last question, Knowledge Avatars™ is bringing artificial intelligence to teaching. Where do you see artificial intelligence and teaching being in several years? When you look at the interaction between students and artificial intelligence, where do you hope it goes?

Where I hope it goes is that every teacher will have their own AI as a teaching assistant, an AI that knows their content, the way they teach, and has their information as well as the sum of human knowledge. The internet is a sum of human knowledge, and there is a lot of stuff out there. You could have an AI that also knows how you teach and knows the information that you want to impart to your students and acts as your teaching assistant.

That is my vision for education, where every teacher will have their own teaching assistant. If you have a class of 30 or 20 students, you could handle those three students that have deep problems that the AI cannot handle. You can work with those three students. The rest of the class could be working on interesting projects and accessing your knowledge via AI, which is your teaching assistant. That way, everybody gets individualized attention even though the human teacher is not quite available at that time because they are dealing with those three students who are having problems.

 

 

I hope that is available in several years. That is going to be such a benefit for society. That’s a cool complimentary of the future, which I appreciate. Thank you for joining us and sharing your vision of the future. For anyone who wants to follow Emiliano De Laurentiis, look at Knowledge Avatars™ or follow him on his LinkedIn. He is doing some great and amazing stuff. Thank you for reading. I will see you in the future. Have a good one.

Thank you very much, Dr. Awesome. It was an awesome talk.

 

Important Links

• Knowledge Avatars™
• LinkedIn – Emiliano De Laurentiis
• Frankenstein
• The Vision

 

About Emiliano De Laurentiis

Emiliano started his career as an educational psychologist and counselor, leveraging his undergraduate work as a cognitive scientist and his love of technology to mold the intersection of education, psychology, and technology. Over the years, he has developed and published dozens of math, science, and social studies courseware. He designed museum exhibits, directed a documentary, and built virtual experiences before VR technology even existed! He was one of the first people to provide learning online and use AI to improve the learner’s experience.

Emiliano has a historical perspective. He was at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center receiving a private viewing of the mouse, visual user interface, and laser printer before they were commercialized. He worked on a national educational network with Novell before the Internet existed. He saw the convergence of half a dozen operating systems into two and witnessed the move from desktop technology to mobile. He has first-hand stories about the evolution of technology in schools that will amaze and inspire you. He’s consulted with dozens of educational institutions, corporations, and the government.