Quill.org Appoints Peter Norvig to Board of Directors

NEW YORK — Quill.org, a non-profit that uses AI to help millions of low-income students become strong writers, readers, and critical thinkers, is pleased to announce that Peter Norvig, a Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and a former Director of Research at Google, has joined the Board of Directors. Since 2014, Quill.org has enabled more than 12 million students to build their literacy skills. Students on Quill have written and revised over three billion sentences, spending more than 40 million hours learning through writing and feedback. 

Peter Gault, Quill’s Founder and Executive Director, shares, “Quill has been on the forefront of AI in education since 2018. Through Google.org, we connected with Peter Norvig in 2019 as we were launching our first AI models. Our goal then, and now, was to ensure that our AI was intentionally designed to best serve students in low-income, Title I schools, requiring Quill to build custom datasets that represent the needs of these students. Over the last seven years, we have now built a series of datasets, with more than 100,000 sentences, to dictate how the AI engages with students through its feedback. As we expand what’s possible with AI, we have been looking for guidance from people who understand both the power of this technology and the long game. Norvig has spent his entire career thinking about how to build AI that actually works for people. That’s the kind of thinking we need as we scale AI-powered feedback tools with reliability, accuracy, and support for real student learning.”

Norvig joins the organization as it seeks to build the next generation of AI-powered learning tools explicitly designed to serve Title I students. Quill intends for these new tools to help millions of students build curiosity, critical thinking, querying, and argumentative writing skills. As software engineering shifts from coding in programming languages to coding in the English language, the need for young people to develop stronger reading and writing skills becomes even more urgent as a new gateway to using AI.

Norvig’s experience maps directly onto this work. While serving as the Director of Research at Google, he oversaw teams that pioneered machine translation, speech recognition, and computer vision, building the kind of custom evaluation and training infrastructure that underpins Quill’s platform today. As a co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach and a co-teacher of a Stanford AI course that enrolled 160,000 students and helped launch the MOOC movement, he brings firsthand experience of AI innovation at scale.  

Peter Norvig reflects, “I've always felt that the one thing that most advanced my career was learning how to write clearly and cohesively. Quill uses the latest AI tools, combined with an approach intentionally co-designed with teachers, to give any student the opportunity to learn these skills.”

Quill intentionally works with educators at every stage of its development process. It hosts a 600-member Teacher Advisory Council, spanning 42 states, to enable hundreds of educators to provide feedback on every AI-powered writing exercise that Quill develops, ensuring that every activity Quill publishes is well-suited for the classroom. Collaborating with the advisory council is Quill’s team of ten full-time curriculum developers, primarily former classroom teachers, who review tens of thousands of student responses each year to continually refine and strengthen the AI. Quill has published its full methodology in its Designing Ethical AI for Learners playbook, making its process transparent and available to the field as it continues building AI-powered learning tools in public. 

Norvig joins at a defining moment for AI in education, reinforcing Quill's drive to build best-in-class learning tools that are technically rigorous, shaped by educators, and built to expand opportunity for students in under-resourced schools. Paul Walker, Quill board chair, shares, “In my decade on the Quill board, I’ve watched the team deploy AI-based, research-focused, student and teacher-centered learning tools which have made a measurable difference in student outcomes. It is wonderful that a researcher of Peter’s stature shares our excitement, and I am thrilled for him to join the board.”