Anti-Absenteeism AI System Makes Skipping Class At This University Impossible

Harin - Mar 25, 2019

Chinese university uses AI to check class attendance rates and find the reasons behind absenteeism. So far, the results have been positive.

For educational institutes struggling to keep track of students’ attendance rates, a China-based artificial intelligence-enabled system is just what they have been searching for all this time.

A Chinese university located in Hangzhou, Zhejiang has released a high-tech class monitoring system. With this system, students will need to register for attendance verification codes through their smartphones. The system will automatically identify those who are absent or late with Ai and facial recognition support. Students who often fails to be on time will get a warning.

For those who skip classes, they would receive a message which reads:

Any response from students will be noted and put into the system. After that, school staff will have a follow-up meeting with these students to find out why they have been absent.

At the moment, only 50% of the courses at the university have used this smart attendance system.

The students’ affairs office’s deputy director, Hu Haibin, said in an interview with Beijing Youth Daily:

The results that the system gives have been positive: students’ attendance rates, compared to previous school years, have increased 7% in just two weeks since the system was adopted.

However, according to Hu, tracking students’ absence is not the main aim of the university. The ultimate goal is to figure out the reasons why the students skip class and put them into different categories for a database.

University staff will also meet students in person to discuss with them about absenteeism.

This educational innovation emerges when the second-largest economy in the world is making efforts in adopting AI into every aspect of life, from saving toilet paper, catching jaywalkers to commercial applications like autonomous vehicles and medical robots.

China is setting a goal to build a domestic AI industry that is worth $US 147 billion. And by 2030, it aims to become an AI powerhouse.

Since 2014, China has been the number one country with the number of AI patent filings, with the U.S in the second spot.