Dhaka University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Dr. Niaz Ahmad Khan, met with Chief Adviser Dr. Muhammad Yunus at the state guesthouse, Jamuna, on Tuesday. During the meeting, the Vice-Chancellor briefed the Chief Adviser on various university matters, including the current status of academic and research activities, ongoing development projects, progress in resolving faculty-student conflicts, and recent measures taken for student welfare. Read: Dhaka University students leverage Facebook, YouTube for learning: Research Dr. Yunus expressed satisfaction with the university’s progress in education and research and assured full support for further advancements in these areas. This meeting is part of a regular update on the university’s overall developments shared with the Chief Adviser.

An academic seminar was jointly organized by Kasetsart University and Bangladesh Embassy in Bangkok on Friday at Kasetsart University campus on the occasion of International Mother Language Day 2023. In the opening ceremony, The Ambassador of Bangladesh to Bangkok Mohammed Abdul Hye was present as a special guest where Dr. Ladawan Puangchit, Vice President (Academic Affairs) of Kasetsart University and Director of Kasetsart University International College and Dr. Buncha Chinnasri, Deputy Director of Kasetsart University International College were also present. Bangladesh Ambassador to Thailand Mohammed Abdul Hye mentioned in his remarks that the main source of the vocabulary of both Bangla and Thai languages is Sanskrit. The same source of written form-the Brahmi script is used in both the languages. Therefore, there is ample scope for further comparative research on Bangla and Thai languages, he added. The Ambassador emphasized on organizing such academic seminars on a regular basis and assured that the Bangladesh Embassy would come forward for such an endeavor with Kasetsart University in the future. At the outset, the Deputy Director of Kasetsart University International College Dr. Buncha explained the background of this joint venture of Kasetsart University and Bangladesh Embassy in Bangkok. Moreover, Dr. Puangchit, in her welcome speech, mentioned the ongoing activities between Kasetsart University and the Bangladesh Embassy in Bangkok including specially earmarked scholarships for Bangladeshi graduates in Masters and Post-doctoral programmes. During the seminar, Dr. Kowit Pimpuang, Associate Professor of Thai Language Department of Kasetsart University, Dr. Sombat Mangmeesukhsiri, Managing Director of the Sanskrit Studies Centre of Silapakorn University and International Mother Language Institute Director General and Dhaka University Communication Disorders department professor Dr. Hakim Arif participated as panelists. At the end, Maleka Parveen, Minister (Political) and Deputy Head of Mission of the Bangladesh Embassy, expressed her sincere thanks to all the panelists for their enlightening discussions.  

The maker of ChatGPT is trying to curb its reputation as a freewheeling cheating machine with a new tool that can help teachers detect if a student or artificial intelligence wrote that homework. The new AI Text Classifier launched Tuesday (January 31, 2023) by OpenAI follows a weeks-long discussion at schools and colleges over fears that ChatGPT’s ability to write just about anything on command could fuel academic dishonesty and hinder learning. OpenAI cautions that its new tool – like others already available – is not foolproof. The method for detecting AI-written text “is imperfect and it will be wrong sometimes,” said Jan Leike, head of OpenAI’s alignment team tasked to make its systems safer. Read More: What is ChatGPT, why are schools blocking it? “Because of that, it shouldn’t be solely relied upon when making decisions,” Leike said. Teenagers and college students were among the millions of people who began experimenting with ChatGPT after it launched Nov. 30 as a free application on OpenAI’s website. And while many found ways to use it creatively and harmlessly, the ease with which it could answer take-home test questions and assist with other assignments sparked a panic among some educators. By the time schools opened for the new year, New York City, Los Angeles and other big public school districts began to block its use in classrooms and on school devices. Read More: CES 2023: Walton's smart AI products get huge response The Seattle Public Schools district initially blocked ChatGPT on all school devices in December but then opened access to educators who want to use it as a teaching tool, said Tim Robinson, the district spokesman. “We can’t afford to ignore it,” Robinson said. The district is also discussing possibly expanding the use of ChatGPT into classrooms to let teachers use it to train students to be better critical thinkers and to let students use the application as a “personal tutor” or to help generate new ideas when working on an assignment, Robinson said. Read More: AI & Future of Jobs: Will Artificial Intelligence or Robots Take Your Job? School districts around the country say they are seeing the conversation around ChatGPT evolve quickly. “The initial reaction was ‘OMG, how are we going to stem the tide of all the cheating that will happen with ChatGPT,’” said Devin Page, a technology specialist with the Calvert County Public School District in Maryland. Now there is a growing realization that “this is the future” and blocking it is not the solution, he said. “I think we would be naïve if we were not aware of the dangers this tool poses, but we also would fail to serve our students if we ban them and us from using it for all its potential power,” said Page, who thinks districts like his own will eventually unblock ChatGPT, especially once the company’s detection service is in place. Read More: How Can Artificial Intelligence Improve Healthcare? OpenAI emphasized the limitations of its detection tool in a blog post Tuesday, but said that in addition to deterring plagiarism, it could help to detect automated disinformation campaigns and other misuse of AI to mimic humans. The longer a passage of text, the better the tool is at detecting if an AI or human wrote something. Type in any text -- a college admissions essay, or a literary analysis of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” --- and the tool will label it as either “very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely” AI-generated. But much like ChatGPT itself, which was trained on a huge trove of digitized books, newspapers and online writings but often confidently spits out falsehoods or nonsense, it’s not easy to interpret how it came up with a result. Read More: Ai and Future of Content Writing: Will Artificial Intelligence replace writers? “We don’t fundamentally know what kind of pattern it pays attention to, or how it works internally,” Leike said. “There’s really not much we could say at this point about how the classifier actually works.” Higher education institutions around the world also have begun debating responsible use of AI technology. Sciences Po, one of France’s most prestigious universities, prohibited its use last week and warned that anyone found surreptitiously using ChatGPT and other AI tools to produce written or oral work could be banned from Sciences Po and other institutions. In response to the backlash, OpenAI said it has been working for several weeks to craft new guidelines to help educators. Read More: Ameca: World’s Most Realistic Advanced Humanoid Robot AI Platform “Like many other technologies, it may be that one district decides that it’s inappropriate for use in their classrooms,” said OpenAI policy researcher Lama Ahmad. “We don’t really push them one way or another. We just want to give them the information that they need to be able to make the right decisions for them.” It’s an unusually public role for the research-oriented San Francisco startup, now backed by billions of dollars in investment from its partner Microsoft and facing growing interest from the public and governments. France’s digital economy minister Jean-Noël Barrot recently met in California with OpenAI executives, including CEO Sam Altman, and a week later told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that he was optimistic about the technology. But the government minister — a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the French business school HEC in Paris — said there are also difficult ethical questions that will need to be addressed. Read More: ChatGPT by Open AI: All you need to know “So if you’re in the law faculty, there is room for concern because obviously ChatGPT, among other tools, will be able to deliver exams that are relatively impressive,” he said. “If you are in the economics faculty, then you’re fine because ChatGPT will have a hard time finding or delivering something that is expected when you are in a graduate-level economics faculty.” He said it will be increasingly important for users to understand the basics of how these systems work so they know what biases might exist.

Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) and equivalent exams for the academic session 2021-22 are being held from today. The exams will be held from 11am to 1pm and 2pm to 4pm. This year, a total of 12,03,407 examinees are sitting for the exams. Of them, 6,22,769 are boys and 5,80,611 are girls. Read more: HSC exams to be held with shortened syllabus, question paper HSC, equivalent exams are being held in 2,649 centers and 9,181 institutions. Examinees will not be allowed to carry mobile phones or any other devices. According to the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education, written HSC exams will continue till December 13. Practical exams will be held from December 15 to 22. Examinees will have to sit for the HSC exams for three hours — for 100 marks — in all subjects. Students will have two hours to finish the exams — 20 minutes for multiple-choice questions (MCQs), and 1 hour and 40 minutes for creative questions (CQs). HSC exams are kicking off with Bangla first paper. All coaching centres across Bangladesh are closed from November 3 to December 14 as per the directives of the government. Read more: Over 12 lakh students expected to sit for HSC exams from Sunday Meanwhile, Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) has imposed a ban on the movement of anyone except Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSC) candidates and exam officials, within 200 yards of test centres in the capital. The DMP announced the new step in a statement Thursday. The public will be completely barred from travelling within 200 yards of test centres to ensure "proper and lawful" exams, according to DMP Commissioner Khandker Gulam Faruq.  

Acclaimed academic Professor Shams Rahman has lashed out at Bangladesh’s first military dictator Ziaur Rahman, the founder of BNP, for “staging a farcical national vote of confidence in 1977 only to solidify his hold on to state power after running the country for 18 months under strict martial law.  Raising questions about the legitimacy centring the birth of Bangladesh’s Nationalist Party, Prof Shams, who teaches at the College of Business and Law at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, divulged that the party was founded with Zia at the helm in barracks, bearing tell-tale hallmarks of Pakistan’s repressive regime that unleashed a genocide in 1971.  “That BNP still remains in a denial mode and continues to glorify the mastermind of those darkest episodes as its founder, even when the nation is celebrating fifty years of independence clearly puts a big question mark over the party’s commitment to the constitution,” he added while addressing a virtual discussion on Monday night.  In reference to the “notorious national referendum” that Zia oversaw back in 1977, Prof. Shams said “that shameful step served a big blow to the spirit of the country’s liberation war, tore down the country’s constitution and offered an olive branch for anti liberation forces—radical elements."   The referendum was marred by a very low turnout, yet the results were manipulated showing around 90% turnout with many centres seeing the number of votes in favour of Zia surpassing the total number of voters registered with those centres, recollected Prof Shams.  Within years into country’s liberation, the father of the nation was assassinated with most of his family members, but in the aftermath, Zia rose to the rank of president and rehabilitated the killers of Bangandhu - trampling the secular credentials of the constitution earned at the cost of  ocean of blood, revealed the Melbourne based professor at a webinar held online yesterday. READ: Critics of Zia are anti-liberation elements: Fakhrul It is sheer irony that BNP still calls the referendum “a great exercise of democratic franchise,” but in reality no one permitted to campaign on the negative side and many opposition leaders still in jail, leaving little doubt on the outcome, said Ajoy Dasgupta, a veteran journalist and researcher, addressing the webinar. Dasgupta, an Ekushey Padak awardee, said the military rulers who had taken over and ruled Bangladesh for the next 15 years legitimized the pro-Pakistan Jamaat-e-Islami, introduced constitutional amendments that undermined the country's secular democratic polity, and finally declared Islam as the state religion of Bangladesh. He said some parties like BNP and its ally, Jamaat-e-Islami, have tried to restore the "Pakistan military-fundamentalist model of radical Islam" but failed.