2019 Curiosity Conference Silicon Valley Rounded off and Squirrel AI Learning by Yixue Group Shows the Power of Chinese AI+ Education

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 18, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Recently, the 2019 Curiosity Conference was rounded off in San Jose. As a global grand event on AI+ Education, the conference was attended by hundreds of scientific and technological professionals and educators, who held discussions on the innovative application and future of "AI+ Education".

This year's Curiosity Conference, which focused on the combination of AI and education, was attended by invitees from leading educational technology companies in Silicon Valley, representatives of cloud computing enterprises, Nvidia, IBM Watson, Toyota Research Center and Squirrel AI Learning by Yixue Group, a leading Chinese AI+ education provider. Biggies gathered at the conference: STAVROS YIANNOUKA, CEO of the World Innovation Summit for Education(WISE), which is the "Nobel Prize Judging Panel in the educational circles", YAO ZHANG, the founder and CEO of RoboTerra, Alex Kaplan of IBM Watson Education and leaders from the global educational and high-tech industries. They held joint discussions on "A Journey to Creation" for the global educational system. Dr. KP Thai, Senior Learning and Data Scientist of Squirrel AI Learning, was invited to a panel discussion at the forum on "the World's Largest Educational Market: Chinese National Educational Policies, AI Technology Application, Education Cases and Challenges" and worked with Product Manager Elaine Yin in briefing the other participants on the product development and technological superiority of Squirrel AI Learning.

Curiosity Conference: A Journey to Creation for AI+ Education

In recent years, AI technology, a would-be core driving force for a new round of industry transformation, has achieved rapid development, leading to changes in technology, industry and business model. It is honored as the fourth industrial revolution. According to relevant data, there was a sharp global increase in papers and journals on AI from 1998 to 2018, and the total number exceeded 630,000, with a compounded annual growth rate of 11.59%. Moreover, behind technical empowerment is an opportunity for industry transformation. Price Wterhouse Coopers (PWC) has also released a forecasting report: driven by the AI technology, the global GDP will have increased by 14% by 2030, equivalent to an increase of USD 15.7 trillion globally.

AI+ education is a profitable combination of technology with application. The education industry has long been facing lots of pain spots. For example, restricted by economic development, economically underdeveloped areas are naturally short of educational resources; the systematic teaching model, used for all students, has geographical and spatiotemporal constraints, with a high requirement for teachers' competency. However, AI technology solves these problems very well. On the one hand, the education industry naturally has a high error-tolerant rate, different from the medical industry, which has a low error-tolerant rate. This is conducive to the implementation of AI technology. With infinite computing power, AI technology can easily cover all knowledge points that students have to learn. With technical features, including the genetic algorithm, logistic regression and neural network, AI technology can significantly provide an optimal learning path for each student, master his learning capacity, habits and preferences, and make it achievable to teach students in accordance with their aptitude.

This year's Curiosity Conference Silicon Valley is a grand event on AI+ education. attended by the world's most outstanding AI and education experts, who started the journey to the creation of AI+ education by touching upon how to develop future learning paths, how to simulate humans' creativity, how to make a man-machine competition in the workplace and how to achieve self-worth.

The WISE, the organizer of this year's conference, was established in 2009 under the leadership of its Chair Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. As an international multidisciplinary platform, the WISE has grown into a global benchmark for new education models by holding a biennial summit and undertaking collaborative research projects. It aims to promote the pervasive application of excellent education models and the future all-round development of education through innovations.

The co-organizer RoboTerra is well-known educational innovation company in Silicon Valley, based in the heartland of Silicon Valley. It specializes in the development of creative robot products, aimed at stimulating creativity and cultivating talents for the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

At this year's Curiosity Conference, Dr. KP Thai, Senior Learning and Data Scientist of Squirrel AI Learning, discussed Chinese education development, policy changes and future education development trend, including the enhancement of individualized learning and the important role of technology in students' learning, with Henan Cheng, a professor at the Columbia University, Sara Mattingly-Jordan, an associate professor at the Virginia Tech University and Vice Chairman of IEEE-SA AI Glossary Committee, and Sophie Chen, the co-founder of Jiemodui.

Dr. KP Thai and Elaine Yin gave a detailed presentation of Squirrel AI Learning's product features and technical characteristics to the other participants, briefed the global AI and education professionals on the development results of adaptive education in China, and answered the questions raised by the spot audience.

Stavros N. Yiannouka, CEO of the WISE; Sara Mattingly-Jordan, an associate professor at the Virginia Tech University and Vice Chairman of IEEE-SA AI Glossary Committee; and Professor Rose Luckin, Chair of the AIED2018 and Director of the University of London Knowledge Laboratory, held a joint discussion at the "forum on the high-tech products with strong design inclusiveness".

Carl Ward, Technical Officer of the Accenture Group; Soulaima Gourani, the author of the book Future Work; and Gilad Babchuk, the founder of Groundswell, made a discussion at the round-table meeting on the new techniques that people would need to master for the future of AI.

The general manager and founder of Future Ventures, Stephen Jurvetson, who was previously appointed as the President's Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship by the former U.S. President Barack Obama, and invested in Tesla and SpaceX as a famous investor in Silicon Valley delivered the closing speech of the conference.

AI+ Education: The Future Development Trend of Education in China

Since 2017, AI has been written into China's government work reports at the two national sessions for three years in a row. Moreover, education, an important area beneficial to the national economy and the people's livelihood, has become a focus of attention of the people.

In the future, AI+ education will become an intensive combination of education and technology. As everyone knows, China is facing a very severe issue of educational inequity. Unparalleled abundant educational resources have been input in developed areas, such as Beijing and Shanghai, rather than the central and western areas. The difference between educational expenditure budgets and resources eventually leads to a gap in teaching outcomes. The final difference in college entrance examination results is represented by the great disparity in the rate of undergraduate admission. School-age students should enjoy educational fairness, and the best way to solve this problem is technology. AI+ education is an optimal solution provided to the traditional education by the latest technical means.

Squirrel AI Learning is a leading Chinese adaptive education provider, which holds a view from the perspective of AI+ education that adaptive education can mine student data and develop learning paths with infinite computing power and intelligent analyses to help students study and provide them with individualized tutoring in accordance with their index map data.

By splitting knowledge points at at the most basic level and making a careful analytical diagnosis with AI, Squirrel AI Learning can judge students' mastery of knowledge points and therefore provide specific guidance for them. In this way, an error cause reconstruction knowledge map can be prepared and non-associated knowledge points can be identified to make education definable, quantifiable and teachable.

As the first AI adaptive education brand in the entire Asia-Pacific region, Squirrel AI Learning has achieved gratifying results in AI+ education and successfully developed an advanced algorithm-based adaptive learning engine with complete proprietary intellectual property rights. The Squirrel AI Learning system serves as an expert teacher and can improve the traditional educational efficiency by 5 to 10 times. In many man-machine competitions held in China, each student in the AI teaching group learned 42 knowledge points on average, while each student in the human teaching group only learned 28 knowledge points on average, which is specific evidence of its success. In terms of technological superiority, Squirrel AI Learning has many global "first-in-class" AI application technologies, including MCM ability training and error cause reconstruction knowledge map, and has published prize-winning papers in top global academic conferences on AI or education, such as AIED, AERA, IJCAI, KDD and ICML, or has been invited to give a speech, yielding unusually brilliant results internationally, and showing to the world the scientific and technological achievements that Chinese AI has made in education.

In the past four years, Squirrel AI Learning has acquired data from about 2 million students, and established cooperation with more than 1,800 schools in more than 30 provinces, autonomous regions and direct-controlled municipalities across the country. In 2018, the head office of Squirrel AI Learning and its cooperative schools in china earned income of about RMB1 billion, and the compound growth rate of three years reached up to 500%.

At the 2019 Curiosity Conference held in Silicon Valley, Squirrel AI Learning, a representative of Chinese AI+ education providers, showed the world the power of Chinese AI+ education and the results achieved in education with AI. In the future, with the gradual maturation of the AI technology, many technological-innovation enterprises in China's educational field will certainly make more outstanding contribution to the world's education industry with their concerted efforts. Adaptive learning will also bring high-quality educational well-being to more global users.

SOURCE Squirrel AI Learning