At Slush Singapore 2018, Squirrel AI Intelligent Adaptive Education Partner Yifang Liao Gives a Keynote Speech

Before the speech, Squirrel AI Learning’s Co-founder and CEO Wei Zhou attended Slush Shanghai 2018 on Sept. 7 and 8 on invitation, and gave a speech titled “Squirrel AI Learning Gives Every Child a Super AI Teacher”. He believes that the training of excellent teachers is a very long process, which requires continuous teaching practice and experience accumulation. At the same time, with limited energy and time, even excellent teachers cannot keep an eye on the whole learning process of every student. Based on this, the Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive learning system came into being. First, it analyzes the knowledge and skills of special-grade teachers based on advanced algorithms, forming a database with complete proprietary intellectual property rights. Next, by repeating the teaching process “early diagnosis focusing on cognitive blind areas – teaching intervention to make up for knowledge deficiency – assessment of current knowledge level – plan of the learning path for the next step”, it assists students with efficient learning, and has becomepopular with many parents and students. So far, the renewal rate of Squirrel AI has reached 80%.

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Slush originated in Finland. With its focus on technology entrepreneurship and investment, Slush has grown from a small gathering of just 300 Finnish local tech entrepreneurs to one of the most popular and influential tech startup investment platforms in the world. So far, Slush has been successfully held in Helsinki, Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore and Shanghai, attracting 250 million people’s attention worldwide.

As a global tech conference committed to “helping the next generation of companies aiming to conquer the world to succeed”, Slush Singapore focused on a number of areas, such as transportation and education, which are in urgent need of change. It attracted a number of industry leaders to give passionate speeches, including Hyperloop Transportation Technologies’ Co-founder and Board Chairman Bibop Gresta, Golden Gate Ventures’ Founding Partner Paul Bragiel, Intrepid Ventures’ Co-founder and Chief Development Officer Zachary Piester, Entropical Labs’ Co-founder and CEO Tommaso Demarie, and Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive education Partner Yifang Liao.

At the conference, Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive education Partner Yifang Liao gave a speech titled “Squirrel AI Learning Will Surpass Human Teachers and Redefine Education” and gave the AI+ education industry a forward-looking interpretation.

In Yifang Liao’s opinion, for thousands of years, the ultimate goal of education has been “to put people first and teach students according to their aptitudes”; however, the actual condition is that school education is a kind of assembly line operation. In the K12 stage, a student is in a certain class of a certain grade; in college, a student is in a certain major of a certain school. The “talents” produced in this education environment are naturally standardized. It’s against the goal of cultivating individualized and innovative talents.

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According to Liao, under the current education system, students not only fail to achieve the goal of efficient learning, but may be bored because of their unclear grasp of knowledge points. “Some students may need only a few minutes to master a knowledge point, while others a class period. The same student may be quick at learning some knowledge points, but slow at mastering others. However, it is impossible for teachers in the same class to slow down or speed up teaching for some specific students. It’s common for “fast-learners to be underfed and slow-learners to be overfed,” she said.

In the 1990s, the concept of intelligent adaptive education began to emerge in the United States. Back then, students were just simply classified into three categories: good, medium and poor, according to their learning levels, so as to match students in each category with the most suitable learning content and path. This education concept achieves rapid development with the support of AI technology. Through AI algorithms, the system acquires and analyzes the learners’ data and gives feedbacks to the existing knowledge maps, provides lessons and exercises at personalized difficulty levels and pace to the learners, thereby improving the learners’ learning efficiency and learning effects.

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Although each country or region has its own history, language and cultural background, education concepts can be shared. The wave of intelligent adaptive education originated in the United States has quickly spread to places like China, India and Japan. For example, Knewton, ALEKS, Byju’s, Dreambox, Squirrel AI and other institutions have launched their own intelligent adaptive education products. Khan Academy, which developed MOOCs in the early days, has also turned to adaptive education, developing targeted contents for different regions and examination outlines, which has accelerated implementing the applications of AI in education.

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