Artificial intelligence, proven at NASA and in neurosurgery, could remake childhood education, says tech exec

Artificial intelligence delivered advances to the U.S. space program and to medicine decades before it made headlines. 

Now, AI is poised to bring major improvements to American education, tech entrepreneur Alex Galvagni said in an exclusive interview in New York City with Fox News Digital.

Galvagni is CEO of Age of Learning, the California-based company behind popular school-room products such as ABCmouse Early Learning Academy. 

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"AI has been with us a long time. Research was happening as early as the 1950s," he said.

In the 1990s, he said, "I worked at NASA doing research in AI, and we applied it to very interesting, complex problems that were not as easily solved with traditional methods."

During his years at NASA, Galvagni worked on the Space Shuttle program. He's held leadership roles with gaming companies and has been at the forefront of advances in artificial intelligence.

AI doomsday scenarios make many people worry about a future ruled by hyper-smart robots — but Galvagni said society has already benefited in many ways from the power of artificial intelligence long before most people ever heard of it.  

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Artificial intelligence, he said, was used to help simulate Space Shuttle docking procedures and to help balance telescopes under many different conditions. 

"We had a telescope we built into a 747 and to be able to balance it while the airplane was flying, we leveraged AI and neural networks in particular."

The same technology found its way into operating rooms in the 1990s to assist with some of the most delicate medical procedures.

"We used AI and neural networks, believe it or not, in brain surgery," said Galvagni.

"We had a program with Stanford Medical Center in which we built a robotic brain surgery device. It had sensors at the tip and, as the probe would go into the brain, the sensors would feed back information which was interpreted by the neural networks," he said. 

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"The information was then fed to the neurosurgeon who would know what best to do at that point."

Galvagni has worked with Age of Learning for the past 10 years. 

He assumed the role of chief executive in September.

Education is one of the next great frontiers, he believes, to benefit from advances in artificial intelligence technology. 

"AI has been applied to all kinds of nonlinear, complex systems," Galvagni said. "What’s happened in the last couple of years is that neural networks have been applied to language, and then you get the large-language models that help with natural language and speech." 

These advances can be harnessed to essentially create individualized educational models for every child in the classroom and millions around the nation or the world.

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"AI can give children the best possible content that we think they need to be able to progress at the right pace," he said. 

"So, this is adaptive content that personalizes the curriculum experience. And then we also have, again — using large language models — the ability to give very specific and useful feedback."

Do AI-powered educational programs such as those created by Age of Learning represent an existential threat to the teaching profession? 

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Galvagni said his company's products are meant to assist teachers — not replace them.

"We've built [products] to really help teachers be successful in the classroom," he said.

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"It's very difficult when you have 30 children and all have their own specific needs. With our software, you can have each child really focus on the areas that they need to focus on."

He added, "We also have dashboards and a lot of data that we feed to the teachers."

So the teachers, he said, "can actually leverage that data to be able to set up time with each individual child or set up groups of children for specialized instruction. And we know that this model works very well."