Professor Ashok Goel of Georgia Tech developed an artificially intelligent teaching assistant to help handle the enormous number of student questions in the online class, Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence. This online course is a core requirement of Georgia Tech’s online Master of Science in Computer Science program. Professor Goel already had eight teaching assistants, but that wasn’t enough to deal with the overwhelming number of daily questions from students.

    Many students drop out of online courses because of the lack of teaching support. When students feel isolated or confused and reach out with questions that go unanswered, their motivation to continue begins to fade. Professor Goel decided to do something to remedy this situation and his solution was to create a virtual assistant named Jill Watson, which is based on the IBM Watson platform.

    Goel and his team developed several versions of Jill Watson before releasing her to the online forums. At first, the virtual assistant wasn’t too great. But Goel and his team sourced the online discussion forum to find all 40,000 questions that had ever been asked since the class was launched. Then they began to feed Jill the questions and answers. After some adjustments and sufficient time, Jill was able to answer the students’ questions correctly 97% of the time. The virtual assistant became so advanced and realistic that the students didn’t know she was a computer. The students, who were studying artificial intelligence, were interacting with the virtual assistant and couldn’t tell it apart from a real human being. Goel didn’t inform them about Jill’s true identity until April 26. The students were actually very positive about the experience.

     The goal of Professor Goel’s virtual assistant next year is to take over answering 40% of all the questions posed by students on the online forum. The name Jill Watson will, of course, change to something else next semester. Professor Goel has a much rosier outlook on the future of artificial intelligence than, say, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak.

解析：C。根据题干中的problem和Professor Goel meet with可定位至原文首段后半部分。文章开始就说到为了回答大量的在线学生提问，戈埃尔教授创造出了一个人工智能助教。接着解释说戈埃尔教授已经有八名助教，但回答线上课程的问题时还是忙不过来， C项表述符合文意，因此选C。文章第二段说很多学生因缺乏教学支持而退出课程，并未说是因为课程太难，也并未说明退出的学生数量太多，故B、D两项排除。文中第三段最后一句提到，学生对助教吉尔的真实身份反响积极，A项与原文内容相悖，故排除。