Chengdu Hosts Forbes China Innovation Summit 2018

Haoyang Li Discusses AI with the Global Innovative Business Community

Forbes China Innovation Summit 2018 (hereinafter referred to as “the Summit”) was grandly held in Chengdu. The Summit lasted 4 days, including 11 keynote speeches, 8 panel discussions and 2 award ceremonies. Around the theme “New Drivers in Global Innovation”, more than 400 Chinese innovative business leaders, business elites, China’s top investment institutions and new prominent entrepreneurs discussed innovative development in global new economies and new trends.

It’s understood that Sherman Lee, CEO of Forbes China, Ruimin Zhang, Board Chairman and CEO of Haier, Min Fan, Vice President and Co-Founder of Ctrip, Joy Tan, Global Media and Communication President of Huawei, Bob Daugherty, Executive Dean of Forbes School of Business & Technology, Haoyang Li, Founder of YiXue Squirrel AI Learning, Sabrina Ho, daughter of Stanley Ho, “the C***** King of Macau”, and partner of the UNESCO, were invited to attend the summit. According to the panel discussion on Education and Innovation among Haoyang Li, Bob Daugherty and Alice Ho, who is now a MIT student, there are already 80-90 million AI education users abroad. In China at present, though the market size for K12 education is up to 600 billion, most of the existing products have not got rid of the shortcomings of rigidity, no creation, centralized and standardized supply in Chinese education. Facing such market conditions, Haoyang Li, inspired by the global AI tornado at that time, creatively put forward the concept of “AI super teachers”. It took his team four years to create YiXue Squirrel AI Learning, China’s first AI adaptive learning engine that has complete independent intellectual property rights and stresses algorithms.

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At the beginning of the summit, Sherman Lee, CEO of Forbes China, delivered a speech titled “New Drivers in Innovation”. He pointed out that innovation is the foundation of value creation. In China, new industries, new business forms and new models are emerging one after another. “Internet+”, artificial intelligence, big data, mobile Internet, AI, blockchain and other technologies are in the ascendant. The transition from old drivers to new drivers is speeding up… The concept that “sci-tech innovation drives development” is deeply rooted in people’s hearts. The correlation between sci-tech innovation and business, industry and economic development is becoming stronger and stronger. This is similar to the idea that “innovation creates wealth” stressed by Forbes.

Russell Flannery, Editor in Chief of Forbes China, respectively interpreted the “Innovation List” and “India List” at the summit. He explained the reason why Forbes China launched the two lists. As to the “Innovation List”, Forbes China believes that only those enterprises with the real consciousness of innovation and reform can stand out in the waves of China’s economic transformation and upgrading. As to the “India List”, Russell Flannery pointed out that India’s innovation power has attracted worldwide attention; China and India have common development features, are relatively open and have relatively a lot of room for economic development; both sides should strengthen the research and exploration of relevant enterprises and help these enterprises to achieve benign development abroad.

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In his keynote speech titled “Haier: Creating an IoT Eco-Brand by Integrating Orders with Personnel”, Ruimin Zhang, Board Chairman and CEO of Haier, used the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Max Weber and Henri Fayol, the three pioneers of Western classical management theories, to prove that classical management theories are no longer applicable in the Internet era. Mr. Zhang believed that Haier must create a new model in line with the demands of the IoT era, which is “Integrating Orders with Personnel”.

Apart from the excellent keynote speeches, the panel discussions were also big highlights of this summit. Sherman Lee, CEO of Forbes China, Russell Flannery, Editor in Chief of Forbes China, and Jian Kang, Director of Strategic Development of Forbes China, respectively chaired the panel discussions. The guests had collisions of ideas respectively on such topics as “Innovation Frontiers”, “How to Create Innovators”, “Sport Technology Innovation”, “Education and Innovation”, etc.

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In the panel discussion on “Education and Innovation”, Bob Daugherty, Executive Dean of Forbes School of Business & Technology, Haoyang Li, Founder and Board Chairman of YiXue Squirrel AI Learning, Alice Ho, Chairwoman of SYMPH, were invited to have in-depth exchanges on education and innovation. Alice Ho’s father Stanley Ho is a famous entrepreneur in Hong Kong and Macau. He is known as “the C***** King of Macau”. Alice Ho received offers from Cambridge and MIT at the same time. Now she is studying at MIT. She is also the Chairwoman of SYMPH.

About the issue whether human teachers will be replaced by AI teachers in the future, which is a general public concern, Haoyang Li also expressed his opinions in the panel discussion. He said: “AI will not completely replace human teachers. We should not be afraid of that. I think AI can replace the teaching work of teachers. If teachers can be free from the complex teaching work, they will be able to communicate more with students and spend a lot of time paying attention to students’ emotions, personality and even values, which is more conducive to the overall growth of students. Parents who have begun to try AI education will find that after a 3-hour in-depth algorithm test, an AI teacher will know the student better than a school teacher who has taught the student for 3 years does.” In a report by Forbes China on YiXue Education (the current YiXue Squirrel AI Learning) titled “YiXue Education: An Intelligent Adaptive Learning System that Knows Where You Are Wrong Better than Human Teachers Do” in 2015, Haoyao Li said: “education is a serious topic,” and online education will not completely replace offline teachers. Today, his opinion hasn’t changed, but has become more systematic and mature.

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At the end of the panel discussion, the guest Alice Ho expressed her appreciation of Haoyang Li’s views. She had in-depth exchanges with Haoyang Li on the core courses and teaching ideas of MIT. MIT is the world’s most innovative and research-intensive university of science and engineering. It has its own methods and ideas in technology application and student training. The world-class AI lab CSAIL in particular gathers MIT’s and the world’s top AI technologies and wisdom.

In recent years, YiXue Squirrel AI Learning has been exploring new drivers for technological innovation in the education sector. It has established a Joint Lab for AI Intelligent Adaptive Learning with SRI International (SRI), and a Joint Lab for Parallel AI Intelligent Adaptation with the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science, to jointly explore sustainable technological innovation capability in the era of AI. Moreover, AI technology papers on AI Intelligent Adaptive System of Yixue Squirrel AI Learning have won awards at the world-top AI academic conference AIED for two years in succession. Yixue Squirrel AI Learning has won many awards and been invited to give speeches at many global top-class academic conferences on AI, such as CSEDU, UMAP and ACM TURC. The education sector is bound to have more effective means of education and models of teaching along with the innovative application of new AI technologies. Yixue Squirrel AI Learning will continue to pass on more quality resources and let technology to empower education faster.