SHANGHAI, China, Sept. 16, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On August 29th, with the theme of “Intelligent Connectivity, Infinite Possibilities”, the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), co-sponsored by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, National Internet Information Office, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Engineering and Shanghai Municipal People's Government, was solemnly held in Shanghai. More than 500 top universities, international organizations and the world’s most influential scientists, entrepreneurs and investors in the field of artificial intelligence gathered in Shanghai. Turing Award winners Raj Reddy and Manuel Blum, former Dean of the School of Computer Science at CMU & Chief AI Scientist of Squirrel AI Learning Tom Mitchell, Nobel Prize winner George Smoot, “Father of Machine Learning”, Finn E. Kydland, Swiss AI Lab IDSIA Scientific Director Jürgen Schmidhuber Co-founder and CEO of Tesla Elon Musk, Chairman of the Board of Directors and CEO of Tencent Pony (Huateng) Ma, Co-chairman of the United Nations High-level Group on Digital Cooperation Jack Ma etc., delivered brilliant speeches and conversations respectively.
In the top-leader conversation session, Elon Musk, Co-founder and CEO of Tesla, conducted an in-depth conversation with Jack Ma, Co-chairman of the United Nations High-level Group on Digital Cooperation. When it comes to education, Musk said, “The lecture is the worst because it’s too slow. It's hard to make fewer mistakes for us in predicting the future, but you have to try first, and then to adjust it according to the errors you have predicted before.”
Elon Musk, Co-founder and CEO of Tesla, conducted a top-leader conversation with Jack Ma, Co-chairman of the United Nations High-level Group on Digital Cooperation.
Jack Ma said that there will be no specific AI profession in the future. He is more concerned about education, “Now our education is mainly designed for the industrial age, I believe that the machine will be much smarter than people in the future, then how can people do better? I think we should change the way we educate.”
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In the opening keynote speech in the morning, Tom Mitchell, “Father of Machine Learning”, former Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and the Chief AI Scientist of Squirrel AI Learning delivered an opening speech. He believes that AI is further accelerating the development trend of the world, especially in the field of perception. Now, computers have reached or even exceeded the level of human perception. “AI + Education” is the real-world application that he has studied for many years. He believes that in the next five to ten years, AI will significantly promote the modernization of education and help foster children’s learning capability, namely, modes of thinking, learning capability and learning methods.
AI has Made Remarkable Achievements in the Past Decade,
and More Cooperation Needs to be Driven in the Future
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In the opening speech, Tom Mitchell said that AI has made remarkable achievements in the past decade. Ten years ago, AI cannot see or hear. Nowadays, it has “sharp ears and eyes", and the world’s most powerful Go Master is also a computer.
“Artificial intelligence is further accelerating the trend of world development. In the field of perception, we see that computers not only reach the level of human beings, but also do better than human beings. For example, AI can determine whether a patient has skin cancer. “Mitchell said, “Natural language perceptual capability is also developing rapidly, and researchers have trained a lot of texts for computers.”
From Mitchell’s perspective, today’s computers can fully understand semantics so that researchers do not need to start from scratch, but stand on the shoulders of giants to develop applications. However, in the field of teaching, AI can judge whether students are focused in class or not, and it is also very clear about the knowledge from kindergarten to senior high school level.
Different from the recognition AI technology such as voice image recognition and NLP, the intelligent adaptive teaching is a strategic AI algorithm in the teaching process, which includes the process of teaching and training, and sets up the teaching path to fully guide students in the whole process from cognition to mastery. Therefore, AI intelligent adaptive education can largely replace the teacher’s teaching process, not just assist the teacher’s teaching process.
Tom Mitchell also illustrated the application prospects of these technologies with examples of transportation, education and intelligent light bulb. Self-driving cars in the future, for example, are all visible, because they would instantly and unlimitedly connect and interact with other surrounding vehicles. They can see what we can’t see here, and know how other cars around them think, what the plan is, or they will also see an emergency that a car around them could see.
Whereas, in the field of education, these AI technologies can help our education system, so we have such opportunity to make rapid progress, and machine learning can use such data to develop better teaching strategies. Another example is that in the future, the price of a light bulb may be twice the price today, but such a light bulb has the function of this mobile phone. It has a camera, a speaker, and has unlimited connection. It has a computer inside and also has a machine learning algorithm. It will possess a wide range of application prospects in many fields such as medical care and catering.
“But I want I really want to say is that the future development of AI needs a win-win situation, not a zero-sum game.” Tom Mitchell said, “Just like every extra one smart car sold in Germany, there will be one less sale share in Japan, which is not what we want to see.” He also called on various countries to allow for cooperation and promote cooperation in the future of AI development plan.
Artificial Intelligence Empowers the Golden Decade
of Intelligent Adaptation Education
At the 2019 WAIC Education Industry themed Forum in the afternoon, this forum can be described as a star-studded forum. Six renowned top experts and scholars in AI and education fields at home and abroad came on stage in turns. They brought the most cutting-edge and authoritative ideas and concepts, and faced directly with the new opportunities and challenges brought by AI for education; 28 guest speakers and discussants are the leading figures in their respective fields. They deeply discussed the hot topics in AI empowerment education, shared mature and successful experience cases, focused on the deep integration of AI and education, and promoted cross-border integration.
Zhaohui Wu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the president of Zhejiang University, Nanning Zheng, a professor of Xi’an Jiaotong University and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Zongkai Yang, President of Xi’an University of Electronic Science and Technology and Director of the National Digital Learning Engineering Technology Research Center, respectively expounded the thinking of Chinese educators on the influence of artificial intelligence and the transformation of education and teaching from the theoretical and practical perspectives; Tom Mitchell, the “Father of Machine Learning” and the Chief AI Scientist of Squirrel AI Learning, delivered a speech entitled “Artificial Intelligence Empowers the Golden Decade of Intelligent Adaptation Education”, which elaborated the latest concept of AI-driven education development from a global perspective.
“Father of Machine Learning”, the Chief AI Scientist of Squirrel AI Learning by Yixue Group Tom Mitchell Delivered an Opening Speech at the 2009 WAIC Education Industry Theme Forum.
Tom Mitchell first looked forward to the next decade, artificial intelligence will have several major breakthroughs in the application of education field. He believes that adaptive technology will achieve major breakthroughs in terms of principle and machine learning models, teaching methodology and the scaling and engineering of AI in education. How the new technology can be further improved so as to adapt to the needs of this teaching, the most important technology is the continuous research and breakthrough of intelligent adaptive education technology.
As the Chief AI Scientist of Squirrel AI Learning, Tom Mitchell also emphasized the intelligent adaptive learning system of Squirrel AI Learning in his introduction, of which the product Squirrel AI is an AI intelligent adaptive learning engine with advanced algorithm as its core. It can simulate a super human teacher to tailor one-to-one educational plans for students through the artificial intelligence system, and implement the one-to-one educational process.
Squirrel AI pioneers the decomposition of nanoscale knowledge points, the decomposition of learning capabilities and learning methods (MCM system), and the deep decomposition of knowledge points to distinctly and accurately discerns students’ knowledge loopholes/weaknesses; on the other hand, through real-time and continuous evaluation of students’ knowledge status and capability level, it can delineate students’ user portraits to provide the best personalized learning solutions, and dynamically adjust to the change of students’ capability level.
This computer-assisted tutoring system has been applied to millions of students; it can allow us to accumulate large-scale teaching experience more quickly. Mitchell hopes that through AI and machine learning, personalized education can be brought into ordinary people’s homes on a large scale. He hopes to leverage the power of the global community and collaborate with many global research institutions to actively demonstrate influence, define the latest global standards, and define what is called an intelligent adaptive tutoring system.
So, how is the Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive learning system applied in practice? Assuming that three groups of individuals, such as scientists, lawyers and divers, are assessed, for example, by asking the three assessed individuals to calculate kindergarten or K12 level math problems. Through such assessments, we can understand that the system is trying to understand the learning styles and thinking patterns of people from a high level. In this way, we can teach them how to fish, and make students obtain better thinking methods and learning methods.
Squirrel AI’s MCM system can quickly detect people's model of thinking, learning capacity, and learning method in a few minutes. Upon the completion of assessment and detection, MCM system can analyze different learning capacities, learning speeds and blind spots and weak points of knowledge points for the learners with the same scores, so as to accurately depict the learners’ user portraits.
With the new generation of artificial intelligence surging in the global scope, AI is also profoundly changing people’s production and lifestyle, while containing a huge market. In the era of intelligence, how education can realize transformation with the aid of artificial intelligence technology is not only the thing that a single education department can be completed independently, but also requires the joint efforts of high-tech enterprises. More and more educational informationization enterprises conform to the general trend of the era of intelligence, play the role of “Digital Assistant” and make use of the technology accumulation and digital content precipitation of enterprises to empower the deep integration of AI + education.
As a front-runner in the field of intellectual adaptive education, Squirrel AI has always been committed to continuously empowering education through AI, exploring large-scale individualized teaching supported by information technology, and promoting the realization of differentiated teaching, individualized learning, fine management and intelligent service under the condition of informationization, so that every learner can obtain better learning method and strategy that suit himself/herself. It actively assists in promoting the reform of Shanghai education management decision-making process, school governance and education and teaching mode, and empower to promote the development of educational informationization undertakings.
“The next five to ten years will be the golden time for AI to realize its ambition, which will make a great difference in AI and create a huge change in the way we teach students. In the future, there will be a wave of application of AI in education. In this wave, China is absolutely the most exciting market for us, and we should strengthen the research of Chinese market in this field.” Tom Mitchell is confident about the future of AI in the education field.