 I'm Daniel Fountainberry, the founder of CoTeacher, and I believe that every child in the world deserves and can have access to a high-quality, caring teacher. Why is this so critical? Because research demonstrates that teacher quality is the most important, school-related factor for influencing student achievement. Teacher quality starts with teacher presence being in the classroom available to students. Here in the West, we take it for granted that our children's teachers will show up to school. But for more than half the world's students, common teacher absenteeism is a serious impediment to student success. Imagine students sitting alone in their classrooms expecting and wanting a teacher for being left to their own devices. The rise in teacher absenteeism is a foresign of a greater problem. Around the world, teachers are burning out and fleeing the profession. And the timing of this trend cannot be worse. According to UNDP, the world will need 67 million more teachers by 2030 in order to educate every child in the world through high school. We're not on track to add 67 million new teachers. So how do we ensure that every child in the world has access to a high-quality teacher despite the growing teacher shortage? That's what we're here to discuss today. I want to speak to you today about a future that's possible that we can achieve if we think big and act boldly. Every child in the world can have access to a high-quality teacher. Now, that could be a teacher who's physically present in their classroom, a teacher who's virtually present or an intelligent agent, an AI that's nearly indistinguishable from a human teacher. Let's talk about each of these three cases and how they build upon each other and how we'll get there. So first, a teacher that's physically present in the classroom. What makes a good teacher? Do you remember the best teacher you ever had? Chances are, there was some moment when a teacher, whatever his or her name was, led you to have a breakthrough. Or you mastered something that you thought you couldn't have and you felt so proud of yourself. That is what great teachers do. They build your confidence in yourself. They prove to you that you're more capable and more talented than you ever imagined. How do they do it? Empathy and emotional intelligence. Now, listen closely. I'm going to let you in on a teacher secret. And athletic coaches know this too. You've got to push the student beyond their comfort zone so that when they achieve a win or a victory, they feel a sense of pride and accomplishment. Here's where the emotional intelligence of a good teacher comes in. A good teacher can see when the child has reached their limit and is becoming discouraged. This little teacher will adjust their voice and say, hey, Tim, you can do this. I believe in you. The teacher may even reach out and place his or her hand on the student's shoulder just to add a bit of extra work. The reason why I'm talking about these very human interactions is this. If we're going to launch teachers into virtual reality, we must provide them the ability to emote and to interpret the emotions of their students. How can this happen in a virtual reality environment? There are technologies that will be essential for enabling the exchange of emotion within virtual reality environments. And the first and most important amongst them is 5G or maybe a successor, 7G. So here's what 5G really does. 5G reduces latency. Simply put, the time it takes for a packet of data to go from your device to the internet and back to your device. What does this mean for expressing emotion in virtual reality? Well, have a good look at my face. Okay, here's my virtual reality face and think about my real face. You'll notice that the range of emotion on my virtual reality face is limited. And when I talk and move, it's a little robotic. It's not fluid. If this environment tried to capture the full range of my emotions and movements and update them in real time so that I look more natural, your computer would fail. Our internet systems are not meant to handle that kind of load, but 5G and its successor technologies are. The future is getting closer. Very soon, expect to have more intimate human connections over virtual reality. In our 5G enabled environment, a teacher can project themselves into a classroom halfway around the world and have an intimate face-to-face discussion with the student. The teacher's camera can read and interpret his or her emotions on their face and project those into the virtual reality space, updating in real time. The student's camera can do the same. It's as if the two are in the same room, speaking to each other, connecting, able to view each other's emotions. Now, once we've enabled any teacher to be anywhere, have we provided every student in the world access to a caring, high-quality teacher? Unfortunately, no, we have not. That is not enough. In a regular classroom, a teacher can manage about 25 students, maybe 30. In a VR environment, it depends. Now, I'm not talking about a lecture hall where the student sits and takes notes like in college. I'm talking about a classroom with kids. Virtual reality or not, a teacher's ability to manage a classroom will top out at about 1T students at a time. So, we still need 67 million more teachers. How are we going to get there? I believe the only way we can close the teacher gap and provide the world enough teachers is to supplement human teachers with intelligent agents. Yes, AI teachers. But could an AI be a teacher, your child teacher? Couldn't AI interpret a child's instructional needs and respond to their emotional needs? Not just respond with a teaching strategy, but also with empathy, something resembling humanity. This is the gap. This is the lead forward we will need to make. So that every child in the world has access to caring and quality teachers. We will need to build agents for virtual reality classrooms that can deliver personalized instruction and interpret and respond to the emotional needs of a child. This may sound like science fiction, but it's within our reach. We just have to look at the innovations that are transforming industries like gaming and e-commerce and put them to use in education. So what are these critically enabling technologies that we need to move forward? Let's look at a few of them. First, voice replication. The ability for AI to replicate and reproduce human voices on the fly. So we're reaching the end of the era of Alexa and Siri voices. Soon, voice application will speak to you with human voices that will make it easier for you to forget you're speaking to a robot. That will be very helpful in a PR classroom setting. Dialogue technology is another. Have you noticed that chatbots and robo callers are getting better and better or at least easier to communicate with? That's because computers are getting better at holding conversations or actually baking conversations by having thousands of responses on hand. Either way, AI based teachers will benefit greatly from research in the field of dialogue technology. And the last technology, virtual world creation. Any gamer knows the best games the one that emerged in a world that is infinitely expansive. Such games are using AI to generate new game components and build scenes on the fly. Scenes and game components that the producers hadn't imagined. So bringing together technologies and voice, dialogue and virtual world creation. We can build AI teachers for virtual world that provide students the guides and support they need to grow as learners. And AI teacher could never replicate a human teacher, but can certainly replace an absent teacher. The world needs 67 million more teachers. AI based teachers must be part of the solution. Let's start working together today to solve the problem of tomorrow because tomorrow will be there very soon. I'm Daniel Fountainberry, the CEO and founder of Code Teacher. And I'm excited to speak with each one of you about building a future where every child in the world has access to a high quality and caring teacher. And that means using technology to maximize the classrooms today and also building for the classrooms of tomorrow. Thank you very much.