In the ever-evolving landscape of education, the need for educators to be equipped with more than just subject knowledge is becoming increasingly evident. This realisation took centre stage at a transformative course held last month in Galway, Ireland, where educators from various EU countries, including the Immaculate Conception Secondary School, Tarxien, converged to delve deep into mindfulness and emotional intelligence.

The course proved to be a pivotal juncture for the educators as they learned to exploit these tools not only for their personal growth, but also to create enriched learning environments for their students. It set out with clear objectives that were seamlessly woven into each session, allowing the educators to grasp both the theoretical foundations and practical applications of emotional intelligence and mindfulness.

The objectives encapsulated a holistic approach to education that was aimed at empowering educators on various levels. Armed with theoretical knowledge, the participants then went a step further to acquire practical skills, as the course provided them with the tools to integrate mindfulness and emotional intelligence into their teaching methodologies.

The course emphasised that educators’ well-being directly influences their teaching effectiveness. The participants were encouraged to make positive changes that would enrich their experiences as educators, ultimately benefiting all staff and students. Educators were empowered with techniques to manage stress, leading to an increase in overall well-being.

Educators’ well-being directly influences their teaching effectiveness

One of the most significant objectives was to mould participants into future ambassadors, who could transfer the acquired skills and knowledge to their peers, thus creating a ripple effect of positive change. As effective communication is the backbone of education, the course aimed to enhance the educators’ communication skills, enabling them to connect more effectively with students, colleagues and parents.

The educators emerged from the course with a toolkit that transcended the boundaries of their classrooms as they discovered how mindfulness could be integrated into their teaching practices, thereby nurturing student well-being and enhancing academic performance.

Armed with new-found emotional intelligence skills, the participants cultivated aspects of self-compassion that can help them to empathise with their students’ needs, and enable them to forge more profound connections and offer better support.

The course instilled in the participants the capacity to harness mindfulness, fostering a learning environment characterised by heightened focus, reduced burnout and increased student engagement. The course encouraged the educators to embrace new cultural contexts and establish networks with international colleagues, fostering a rich and diverse educational experience.

The educators left Galway with enhanced emotional intelligence and a mindful approach that they are eager to impart to their students and colleagues. By nurturing educators’ own well-being and communication skills, this movement promises a future where educators cultivate not just academic prowess, but also the emotional intelligence and mindfulness that fosters a well-rounded and empowered generation.

The participating educators came from various EU countries, encouraging them to embrace new cultural contexts and establish networks with international colleagues.

For more information about courses at Atlantic Language School, visit www.atlanticlanguage.com.

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Alteryx Analytics Automation powered by AWS allows CFOs to modernize financial processes with new technologies and automated self-service analytics in the cloud

IRVINE, Calif., July 10, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Alteryx, Inc. (NYSE: AYX), the Analytics Cloud Platform company, today announced decision intelligence and intelligent automation capabilities on Amazon Web Services (AWS) designed to empower chief financial officers (CFOs) and finance leaders to embrace cloud and data analytics as strategic tools for their modernization goals.

“Analytic insights help us tailor digital transformation solutions based on our clients’ needs to achieve the greatest impact for their business,” said Ana Margarita Albir, president at ADL Labs. “Leveraging Alteryx and AWS, we are able to integrate capabilities across any data source, visualize and analyze data in real time, and enhance security, resulting in an estimated $6 million in cost and efficiency savings for both ADL and our clients.”

Changing regulations and manual processes in the office of finance often mean repetitive work, time consuming data input, and hours of labor spent in preparing spreadsheets. The Alteryx intelligent automation capabilities available on AWS maximize the benefits of cloud for office of finance teams by modernizing processes that help them solve more complex data problems and adapt to constantly changing market environments. Highlights:

• Impact the bottom line: Analytics automation significantly reduces the time and effort spent with manual processes, freeing up time for analysts on strategic projects moving the business forward. For instance, analysts on billing teams have used Alteryx to reduce the cost of overhead of manual bill reporting up to 25 percent.1 An accounting team reconciling financial data reduced time spent on reconciliation processes up to 99 percent.2 
• Modernize with new technologies: Alteryx leverages the power of AWS to provide an environment where technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, robotic process automation, and blockchain meet, making it easier for CFOs to quickly deploy and use new technology right away. For example, a finance team relying on labor-intensive, outdated tools for calculating sales tax liability can quickly adopt automation and configure alerts on incorrectly taxed transactions, freeing up tax resources for higher-value activities.
• Gain data-driven insights at scale: Finance departments are expected to deliver regular insights to management for decision-making. Alteryx provides an automated process for connecting and combining different data sources, helping finance teams quickly process and transform large amounts of data so they can generate reports in a fraction of the time.
• Digitally upskill across finance: Alteryx provides a self-service, low-code/no-code environment so that an analyst or business user can quickly upskill in data and analytics while leveraging the power and scalability of AWS.

“Businesses globally are looking to automate for efficiencies and drive deeper insights to quickly respond to multifaceted challenges and dynamically changing landscape,” said Nitin Brahmankar, vice president, ISV and Global Ecosystem Partnerships, Alteryx. “We are working with AWS to empower finance teams to leverage the power of the cloud and modernize financial processes to perform critical analysis that truly matters to their bottom line.”

“With Alteryx Analytics Automation powered by AWS, finance teams can innovate and modernize tax and audit processes with automated self-service analytics that streamline and accelerate traditional compliance work,” said Madhu Raman, worldwide head of automation at AWS. “Organizations can benefit from templates that help data analysts and line-of-business users to use, customize, extend, and integrate enterprise data with intelligent automation workflows that assist with record to report, procure to pay, and order to cash processes.”

Get the insights you need to modernize the Office of Finance with Alteryx and AWS.

1 Bill Reporting | Alteryx. (n.d.). https://www.alteryx.com/use-case-navigator/bill-reporting
2 Reconciliation of Financial Systems | Alteryx. (n.d.). https://www.alteryx.com/use-case-navigator/reconciliation-of-financial-systems 

About Alteryx
Alteryx (NYSE: AYX) powers analytics for all with the award-winning Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform. With Alteryx, enterprises can make intelligent decisions across their organizations with automated, AI-driven insights. More than 8,300 customers globally rely on Alteryx to democratize analytics across use cases and deliver high-impact business outcomes. To learn more, visit www.alteryx.com.   

Alteryx is a registered trademark of Alteryx, Inc. All other product and brand names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE Alteryx, Inc.

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1. Practice deep breathing exercises to calm your mind and body.
2. Start a daily gratitude journal, listing things you are grateful for.
3. Take a few minutes each day to reflect on your emotions and how they affect your actions.
4. Practice meditation to improve focus and reduce stress.
5. Practice self-compassion by treating yourself kindly and understanding your own struggles.
6. Take a break from technology and spend time in nature.
7. Practice active listening, fully engaging with the person speaking.
8. Practice empathy by putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.
9. Practice forgiveness, letting go of resentment and anger towards others.
10. Take time to appreciate the small moments in life.
11. Practice mindfulness in daily activities, such as brushing your teeth or eating a meal.
12. Practice self-awareness by identifying your strengths and areas for improvement.
13. Practice mindfulness in communication, choosing your words carefully and listening actively.
14. Practice relaxation techniques, such as yoga or tai chi.
15. Take time to reflect on your personal values and how they guide your actions.
16. Practice self-reflection, looking at your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors objectively.
17. Practice self-care, prioritizing your physical, emotional, and mental health.
18. Take breaks throughout the day to recharge and avoid burnout.
19. Practice resilience by bouncing back from setbacks and challenges.
20. Surround yourself with positive and supportive people.

Incorporating these mindfulness practices into your daily routine can help increase your emotional intelligence, leading to greater success and fulfillment in all areas of life. Start small and gradually build up your practice, and don’t forget to celebrate your progress along the way.

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An AI-based tool analyzes responses to mental health concerns and helps clinicians and others craft accurate and empathetic responses, researchers say. Photo courtesy of Tim Althoff

NEW YORK, May 25 (UPI) — Patients with medical questions who reach out to providers online may soon get the answers they need faster, thanks to communications tools enhanced with artificial intelligence, or AI, experts told UPI.

However, these new technologies, called chatbots, won’t replace human responses entirely, and shouldn’t, the experts said.

Instead, they will assist doctors and other clinicians in crafting more “empathetic” and informative responses and deliver them in a timely manner, they said.

“Our doctors are getting inundated with patient messages, and patients expect a response, and rightfully so,” said Dr. Christopher A. Longhurst, chief medical officer and chief digital officer at UC San Diego Health, which is piloting an AI-enhanced communication platform through its electronic health record system.

A new, AI-based program at UC San Diego Health allows the system’s doctors to respond to emails from patients more efficiently and “the patients love it” because they get the information they need, Longhurst told UPI in a phone interview.

Chatbots’ role in healthcare

Chatbot technologies, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which debuted late last year and already has more than 100 million monthly users, engage AI to generate detailed and human-like text based on specified source material, such as websites, according to Boston College.

Though research suggests the technology has been used to spread health misinformation online, the technology has several potential positive applications in medicine, including helping providers write responses to patient questions, according to Longhurst.

It can also be used to train providers in how to craft messages that are clearly written, clinically accurate and empathetic, Tim Althoff, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, told UPI in a phone interview.

With UC San Diego Health’s AI-enhanced communications program, participating physicians see emails from patients seeking test results or asking questions about health conditions and/or symptoms in the electronic health record system, according to Longhurst.

On a section of the screen, the AI software generates a draft email response, which physicians can then choose to use as a starting point or write their own “from scratch,” he said.

“There’s no option to just send — either way, the doctors have to write or edit a response,” Longhurst said.

Responses generated with input from AI include a disclaimer that acknowledges that “part of this message was automatically generated in a secure environment and edited by your doctor,” he said.

“We’re being transparent with our patients because we know it would be creepy otherwise,” Longhurst said. “We’re helping the doctors save time, but this is still the doctor’s message, because they’re writing or editing it.

In one example, he said, the technology improved the “quality” of a doctor’s response to a patient concerned about daily marijuana by identifying resources for quitting and counseling services that the physician hadn’t been aware of.

EHR vendor Epic Systems announced last month during the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference that it is working with Microsoft to integrate “generative” AI into its software to create a similar platform for physician users.

Positive data

UC San Diego Health began its pilot of AI-assisted communication in January after seeing the initial results of a study co-authored by Longhurst and his colleagues at the University of California-San Diego.

The study, published by JAMA Internal Medicine on April 28, asked physicians to compare AI-generated responses to patient health questions on Reddit’s r/AskDocs with those crafted by healthcare professionals.

Physicians in the study preferred the Chatbot-generated responses nearly 80% of the time and indicated that the AI messages were generally more “empathetic” than those written by humans alone, the researchers said.

“You’ve got millions of people out there who are desperate for information and posting questions anywhere and everywhere,” study co-author John Ayers, chief of innovation with the division of infectious disease and global public health at the Qualcomm Institute at University of California-San Diego, told UPI in a phone interview.

“This technology can help [clinicians] respond to these questions — so how do we use it in a responsible manner?” he asked rhetorcially.

Chatbots and mental health

Althoff and his team, meanwhile, have been working with Mental Health America, a nonprofit focused on people living with mental illness, to develop a tool called “Changing Thoughts with an AI Assistant.”

In a study scheduled to presented in July during the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the researchers asked more than 2,000 visitors to the Mental Health America’s website to describe any negative thoughts they may have been experiencing.

The chatbot tool then generated messages that suggested ways in which these negative thoughts could be “reframed,” Althoff said.

“We are testing and developing a self-help tool that uses [AI] in a very specific way: to identify cognitive distortions that may be present in a user’s negative thoughts and to suggest ways to reframe these thoughts to be more positive, realistic and helpful,” the Mental Health America’s director of communications, Katie Lee, told UPI in an email.

In another pilot program, Althoff and his colleagues are using chatbot technology with Talklife, a global peer support network for mental health that provides counseling services, to train the platform’s peer supporters how to write effective and empathetic responses to peer questions and concerns.

In an example Althoff provided, a visitor to the peer support platform enters the following message into the chat feature: “My job is becoming more stressful with each passing day.”

Without input from the AI-based platform, a peer responds: “Don’t worry, I’m there for you.”

“‘Don’t worry’ is not the worst response, but it can come across as invalidating,” meaning it can be interpreted as being dismissive of someone’s concerns or symptoms,” Althoff said. “If they’re seeking help, they’re already worried.”

The chatbot tool developed by Althoff and his colleagues instead suggests the following response: “That must be a real struggle.”

It also recommends that the peer supporter try to learn more about the situation, while offering the visitor some advice, by adding: “Have you tried talking to your boss?”

“We train these language models to use as much of [a peer’s] original message as possible, so that the responses are authentic and to increase their confidence in their ability to support others,” Althoff said.

Why AI

By streamlining the response-writing process, chatbot technology can help clinicians respond to more patient requests, submitted by email or online, more quickly, Longhurst said.

This is an important consideration, given that healthcare providers receiving dozens or even hundreds of queries about medical problems daily, he said.

In fact, the volume of patient communications has prompted some health systems to charge fees to patients for expert responses “to disincentivize this type of communication,” he added.

Support from “an AI Chatbot could change that equation,” meaning patients ultimately would be more likely to get the information they need, UC-San Diego’s Ayers said.

The technology can also correct typos, grammatical errors and even mistakes in medical information so that patients “ultimately get more solid and accurate advice,” he said.

Saving clinician time isn’t only about efficiency, though, according to Longhurst.

With burnout among healthcare providers on the rise nationally since the COVID-19 pandemic, the support provided by the technology also can reduce stress, allowing more time for patient care, he said.

Freeing up providers also may give the ability to see and evaluate more patients, addressing issues related to access to care caused by specialist shortages in many parts of the country, Althoff added.

“We know there is a huge gap in access to mental health services in certain areas and, as a result, the public is turning to online resources and social media,” Althoff said.

“Platforms that are using AI, responsibly, to enhance communications with these patients will be able to achieve better results, which ultimately benefits patients,” he said.

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