AMSTERDAM, Dec. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On Oct. 10, World Summit AI was successfully held in the Netherlands. Technology experts from around the world had in-depth discussions on the underlying theoretical frameworks, application scenarios and development trends of AI. This summit had various activity components, such as keynote speeches and roundtable sessions, aiming to solve various thorny problems that AI may encounter in the future.
In the entire AI ecology, World Summit AI brings together the world's most famous AI entrepreneurs, investors and tech leaders. It is the world's leading and most important AI summit. Squirrel AI Learning’s founder Derek Haoyang Li, Co-founder & CEO Jason Wei Zhou and Partner Joleen Liang brought Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive product to this year’s summit on invitation. They exchanged and shared their experience with the father of neural networks Yoshua Bengio, J. P. Morgan’s Chief AI Scientist and CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) Professor Manuela Veloso, NASA’s AI Director Steve Chien, IBM Global Partner Jay Bellissimo, and Microsoft AI Chief Technology Officer Joseph Sirosh.
According to Derek Li, in recent years, the combination of AI and adaptive education has shown a trend of rapid development. Globally renowned intelligent adaptive education platforms such as Knewton, Smart Sparrow and Squirrel AI Learning have sprung up, bringing disruptive innovations to the traditional education model and instructions.
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Among them, Knewton is the largest intelligent adaptive education platform in the United States. It mainly provides predictive analyses and personalized recommendations for schools, publishers and learners, covering K12, higher education, vocational education, etc. In general, its reformation of traditional education is mainly reflected in three aspects. First, according to students' learning data, it evaluates the learning content for the next stage and then recommends relevant content. Second, it provides predictive learning data analysis to grasp students' learning status. Third, it assesses the quality of course content and analyzes the impact of the content on students, etc. With these achievements, Knewton was hailed as “Technology Pioneer” at the World Economic Forum and named one of the top 10 innovative companies in the global big data field by magazine Fast Company. Since 2008, Knewton has raised $137 million from eight rounds of financing and become a globally-renowned unicorn company in the AI intelligent adaptive education field.
In China, the number of online education users has increased rapidly with the popularization of smart phones and the increase of live streaming apps. According to the latest Online Education Insight released by mobile Internet big data company QuestMobile, education apps have more than 220 million monthly active users, while China’s population of mobile Internet users is about 788 million. Almost one in four netizens are online education users.
Meanwhile, cases of online education combining with AI are also increasing and finding favor in the eyes of many venture capital investors. According to a forecast by ZHIYAN.ORG, China’s AI+ education will have a huge market size of at least 300 billion RMB by 2020. It may become the next “gale”.
As the earliest pioneer of intelligent adaptive education in China, Yixue Education launched the Squirrel AI adaptive learing system, which revolutionizes China’s K12 education from the education model, teaching organization, examination system and even education fairness, aiming to reshape a new model for future education.
First, Squirrel AI Learning intelligent adaptive system puts “student-centered” individualized education into practice. The idea of “teaching students in accordance with their aptitudes” has been mentioned repeatedly since Confucius, but most people think of it as the ultimate ideal state of education, something desirable but unreachable. In fact, that is because in the traditional education model teachers cannot define knowledge points accurately for each individual student. They can only roughly learn students’ levels of mastery, so they cannot give targeted solutions.
With the emergence of AI, its infinite computing power makes the problem of knowledge point spitting readily solved. For example, Squirrel AI Learning’s knowledge decomposition has reached the world-leading nanoscale level. One general knowledge point in the syllabus may be decomposed into a total of 13 knowledge points in the knowledge system built by Squirrel AI! Such a knowledge base with AI algorithms can timely screen out the knowledge points that students have mastered and the knowledge points students are weak at. Moreover, Squirrel AI has a knowledge correlation theory system. It can extend from the knowledge points that a student has not mastered on the surface in the current level to the prerequisite knowledge points the student has not mastered related to the current knowledge point the student is learning. As a result, in just one hour, it can clearly understand a student’s mastery of 5,000 knowledge points and truly diagnose the student’s knowledge loopholes.
What’s more, Squirrel AI can also break down students' learning abilities, making them “definable, measurable and teachable”. In this way, Squirrel AI ties knowledge points closely to students, the subject of education. On this basis, through the algorithms, it matches students' conditions with learning content intelligently and draws up a student-centered personalized learning plan for each student. For example, if a student has mastered content to score 70 points, Squirrel AI will present the student the knowledge to help he/she score 75 points. The degree of difficulty will be adjusted dynamically according to students' mastery of knowledge points, making them always in a “fed but not overfed” state, to improve their scores step by step.
Next, today's increasingly tense “teacher-student relationship” may be improved with the development of Squirrel AI. In Derek Li’s opinion, at present, not every teacher is a skilled special-grade (a title award to the most excellent teachers) teacher. As a result, students are often unconvinced by their teachers because their authority in knowledge is impaired. However, the AI teacher is different. Squirrel AI is a collection of master teachers’ experience and wisdoms. It can provide the best solution for each student and helps them grasp knowledge points and improve their learning abilities.
About the possibility that AI may endanger the status of human teachers, Derek Li also has a different view. He thinks at present, AI teachers are not mature in emotion and moral education, but human teachers have natural advantages in this respect. With the “synergy between human teachers and the AI teacher”, “teaching” and “education” can be combined organically. It not only optimizes the relationship between teachers and students, but also benefits the all-round development of students.
Since Oct. 2017, Squirrel AI learning has organized four human vs. machine competitions. The first three competitions were held in Zhengzhou, Chengdu and Shandong in succession, to analyze and compare the differences between Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive system and human teachers. After that, to show the effectiveness and universality of Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive learning system, another human vs. machine competition in 100 cities was organized this August. The result showed in terms of the average score increase, the machine-taught group increased 5.4 points on average, while the human-taught group increased only 0.7 points on average. In the same period of time, the machine-taught group mastered more knowledge than the human-taught group.
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Moreover, Squirrel AI also vigorously promotes the implementation of the “online + offline” education model. It has opened more than 1,600 learning centers in more than 300 cities of 20 provinces (municipalities or autonomous regions) in China, with more than 3,000 teachers, providing more than 1 million students with “human +AI” teaching services. It is committed to students’ comprehensive improvement in knowledge, ability and emotion.
At the same time, Squirrel AI continues to increase its investment in the AI field. It has carried out strategic cooperation with Stanford Research Institute (SRI). SRI will provide research on AI technologies. In the meantime, it has established a Joint Lab for Parallel AI Intelligent Adaptation with China Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Automation, for co-construction and sharing in AI and education theories.
Finally, inequities in education will be effectively mitigated in the era of AI. In China, education resources such as special-grade teachers are mostly concentrated in first- and second-tier cities. Education in most remote areas is still very backward. Squirrel AI can give every child a special-grade AI teacher suitable to their own learning level, to provide “one-to-one tutoring” service for them.
At the same time, with the assistance of AI, everyone can quickly and effectively test their mastery of knowledge points in daily study, thereby forming an important criterion similar to America’s GPA. When everyone's knowledge is quantified by AI, the examining body can classify students according to their data saved in AI. It is clear which student can go to double first-rate universities or universities in Project 985 or Project 211. It’s also clear which field is suitable for a student. It can not only put an end to the “unfair college entrance examination”, which is mentioned frequently by some people, but also make China's education more in line with the standards of quality-oriented education.
Apart from Squirrel AI Learning’s Founder Derek Li’s wonderful presentation, Squirrel AI Learning’s Partner Joleen Liang attended the roundtable session for unicorn companies with Recursion Pharmaceutical (biotech)’s Chief Data Scientist Mason Victors, Mobius Labs’ CEO and Chief Scientist Appu Shaji, Aigent’s Founder and CTO Sebastien Lagemann, etc. They discussed and communicated about the innovations and practices of AI technology in different fields such as medical care and education.
After the summit, Squirrel AI Learning’s CEO Mr. Jason Wei Zhou invited J. P. Morgan’s Chief AI Scientist and CMU Professor Manuela Veloso, who had led the Robot World Cup champion team, Google Technology and Cambridge University’s Policy Researcher and AI Researcher Jonnie Penn, and Fondation Botnar’s CEO Stefan Germann to Squirrel AI Learning World AI Summit Speakers’ Dinner.
As a unicorn company in the field of intelligent adaptive education in China, Squirrel AI Learning appeared at World Summit AI. It not only announced China's highest achievements in AI-enabled education, but also shared the theories and practice of the subversion of traditional education by AI with other experts and scholars around the world, hoping to build a global AI intelligent adaptive education ecosystem hand in hand with relevant enterprises around the world.
About Squirrel AI Learning
At present, Squirrel AI Learning already has more than 1 million users. Next, it will develop an OpenAI platform, so that all institutions and individuals no longer need to develop their own intelligent adaptative systems. In addition, Squirrel AI Learning will offer 1 million learning accounts to children from poor families for free.
To learn more about Squirrel AI Learning, please visit http://www.squirrelai.us/.