Cognitive computing in education

Cognitive computing is the new wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI), relying on traditional techniques based on expert systems and also exploiting statistics and mathematical model. In particular, cognitive computing systems can be regarded as a "more human" artificial intelligence. In fact, they mimic human reasoning methodologies, showing special capabilities in dealing with uncertainties and in solving problems that typically entail computation consuming processes. Moreover, they can evolve, exploiting the accumulated experience to learn from the past, both from errors and from successful findings. From a theoretical point of view, cognitive computing could replace existing calculators in many fields of application but hardware requirements are still high, even if the cloud infrastructure, which is expected to uphold its rapid growth in the very next future, can support their diffusion and ease the penetration of such a novel variety of systems, fostering new services as well as changes in many settled paradigms. In this paper, we focus on benefits that this technology can bring when applied in the education field and we make a short review of relevant experiences.