David Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has taught at Stanford for more than forty years, credits the university with helping needy students and spawning talent in engineering and business, but he worries that many students uncritically incorporate the excesses of Silicon Valley, and that there are not nearly enough students devoted to the liberal arts and to the idea of pure learning.

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He has since gone on to experiment with the idea of self-learning, offering software to children living in remote parts of India so that they can teach themselves.

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However, the idea that general-purpose robots, capable of learning, will become widespread is wrong, suggests Mr Angle.

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The idea is to use the natural human instincts of playing and learning to familiarize patients with their illness and to help them to better monitor and treat it.

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Paige, a 2010 graduate of Wagner College, a school with an esteemed service-learning program, was inspired by social innovation and the idea of AltruHelp using social technology to amplify volunteerism.

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"From about 1990, a group in the U.S. came up with the idea of just treating it as a statistical problem -- more of a machine learning problem where you essentially ignore linguistics and just look for patterns in data, " he said.

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Automatic learning, the technical term for this idea, has been a longtime dream of the cyberpunk set.

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