Squirrel AI Learning by Yixue Group wins the Bloomberg Businessweek Business Innovation Award of 2018

SHANGHAI, April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Recently, "The Year Ahead" Summit hosted by Bloomberg Businessweek was held in Shanghai, where global top business leaders, famous investors and economists gathered together and discussed international current events of the year to predict the global economic trend and look into the upcoming new business world. At the summit, Squirrel AI Learning won the Businessweek Business Innovation Award of 2018 with its outstanding commercial contributions and innovation ability.

Squirrel AI Learning's partner Joleen Liang was invited to the summit and gave a forward-looking summary of the AI+ education industry. According to Joleen, AI+ will be a revolutionary wave more subversive than the Internet+, and the application of AI to education will help to precisely grasp the distribution of various subject knowledge points and students' degree of mastery of knowledge. Adaptive AI education will bring students personalized teaching to greatly improve their learning efficiency and promote the revolutionary development of the education industry.

"The Year Ahead" Summit has been successfully held three times in China. Adhering to Bloomberg Businessweek's positioning as "leading, not following", the five themes of "The Year Ahead" Summit, including China and the World, Consumption, Retail and Service, Technology Innovation, and Literary Creation and Innovation, have been continued and renewed in order to thoroughly understand the business status and look forward at the future trends. Present at the summit were, among other distinguished guests, Zhou Hanmin, Vice Chairman of People's Political Consultative Conference and China National Democratic Construction Association; Shu Chang, a chief economist of Bloomberg Asia; Brett Bruen, President of GSR and former Supervisor White House Global Affairs Department; Dr. Rollan Roberts, CEO of Courageous and an advisor to World Governments; Anthony LaMolinara, an American director, playwright, visual effects supervisor, winner of the 77^th Academy Award for the best visual effects director and Hollywood movie master; and Joleen Liang, partner at Squirrel AI Learning.

Looking back at 2018, a year when business returned to reason, the essence of business can be clearly seen, finding that new technologies are used in order to further improve productivity, because only when technology innovations are fused with business is it possible to achieve business successes. In the field of adaptive education, Squirrel AI Learning's commitment to solving educational problems such as resource imbalance and low learning efficiency through technological means is a revolution that is sweeping the education industry. For this very reason, Squirrel AI Learning's effort has been recognized by all walks of life and granted the Businessweek Business Innovation Award of 2018.

What matters the most to the global economy in 2018 is China's economic exchange with the world, as well as the resulting opportunities and conflicts. "The Year Ahead" Summit stood on the past, looking ahead. An insightful discussion was carried out on the global and Chinese political and economic situation among Li Jing, Managing Director of JPMorgan Chase and Vice Chairman of Asia Pacific Region; Li Shanquan, Senior Vice President and Senior Fund Manager of Oppenheimer Funds; Brett Bruen, former Supervisor of White House Global Affairs Department; and Qian Yujun, General Manager of BS Securities Co., Ltd.

Shu Chang, a chief economist of Bloomberg Asia, gave an outlook on China's economy from an economic point of view as a profound annotation to the global commercial and financial trends in 2019.

The film industry is the most perfect fusion of art with dream-making. During its rapid development in recent years, China's film industry has been trapped in the dilemma of a collision between capital and technology and is thinking deeply about it. Anthony LaMolinara, an American director, playwright, visual effects supervisor, winner of the 77^th Academy Award for the best visual effects director, and Hollywood movie master, had a heated discussion on the future development trend and promotion strategy of cinematographic works with a number of senior insiders from home and abroad.

2018 is the year when the AI industry developed "both smoothly and tortuously". According to the statistical data in the Report on China's AI Industry Market Prospects and Strategic Planning and Analysis of Investments released by the Prospective Industry Research Institute, by 2017, the global core scale of AI had exceeded USD3.7 million, and the Chinese core scale of AI had reached USD560 thousand. It is expected that the global core scale of AI will exceed USD13 million in 2020. Under this wave, on the other hand, the icy reality comes with a wintry capital market. Due to the cautious attitude towards the AI industry, capital cannot be put into use casually, causing technologically undeveloped enterprises to be eliminated one after another by the times.

However, in such a market, Squirrel AI Learning has, so far, raised a total of RMB1 billion, with its valuation exceeding USD1.1 billion, making itself a unicorn of AI education.

At the summit, Joleen Liang, partner at Squirrel AI Learning, gave a speech themed "AI+ is going to be a Wave More Subversive than the Internet+". According to her, AI technology will replace 90% of human jobs, especially in the traditional education industry, where there are many problems. For instance, although new teachers enter the industry in a steady stream each year, there remains a severe shortage of teacher resources in the whole educational market. Moreover, there is a difference in individual working experience and ability and teaching level. Additionally, there is a difference from educational environment to educational environment, as well as in students' starting point and learning capacity. All these have made the educational problem a complex social issue. In this complex situation, there is great demand for an effective tool to improve the industry. Squirrel AI Learning has established itself in the education field and developed an AI technology to make up for the shortage of personalized education and teacher resources, two pain points.

Joleen Liang deeply analyzed AI and the AI education industry from the perspective of the four characteristics of AI: omniscience, high identification ability, infinite computing power and self-evolution.

The first characteristic of AI: omniscience, with all industry data available

For instance, the IBM medical robot Watson can read 3496 medical monographs, 248 thousand papers, 61540 pieces of data and 106 thousand clinical reports within 17 seconds. For a doctor with 30 years of clinical experience, he has to spend all his life reading through so large a data volume, while the AI just needs to spend 17 seconds.

When the AI technology can be maturely applied in the medical field in the future, its omniscience will enable it to be held in greater esteem by patients.

In the field of education, the omniscient Squirrel AI Learning can quickly recognize the distribution of all knowledge points of each subject, the correlation between knowledge points and how much each student has mastered knowledge points. Through tests, teachers can get a clear grasp of the degree of each student's mastery different knowledge points, and therefore help them avoid traditional experience errors. By deeply analyzing correlative knowledge points, teachers can help each student build a tighter knowledge network to provide them with the most proper learning content and path.

Before extensive promotion, Squirrel AI Learning conducted an internal test by asking a student to study systematically through the Squirrel AI system. Before use, because she was quite unclear about the related knowledge points, some of which were acquired more slowly than the others, causing a vicious cycle and she, as a poor student, became weary of studying. Her grades were just 30 or so.

After using Squirrel AI, the correlation among the knowledge points was clarified, forming a network-like knowledge system. Learning about her weaknesses, Squirrel AI analyzed her learning data and reported it back to an existing knowledge graph, providing the student with personalized courses and exercises as a custom learning program. Just 3 months later, her grades were raised by 20. Finally, her graduation results were raised to 90 or so, almost the same as that of the rest of her class.

The second characteristic of AI: high identification ability, able to draw a picture of millions upon millions of user labels

The public is most familiar with Toutiao's personalized accuracy. According to user preferences, such as reading and searching habits, the system can identify every of their tiny labels and accurately provide content that interests them.

By accurately analyzing massive data and labels belonging to every student, Squirrel AI Learning can pinpoint their weaknesses and then teach them in accordance with their aptitude, so as to deliver them out of rote learning. After recognizing students' weaknesses, Squirrel AI Learning can, in accordance with their degree of mastery of knowledge points and learning attentiveness, collect multi-dimensional data to make continuous assessments and make a unique learning path to learn more about their conditions to improve their learning efficiency.

The third characteristic of AI: infinite computing power, able to figure out massive data quickly

A lot of practice in games in the financial market and stock market shows that AI has outperformed talented stock investors. As for data processing, AI can extract information from millions upon millions of research reports in one stroke by mining massive amounts of stock data, and the AI algorithm is also much more accurate than humans. The AI architecture algorithm can help to gain a higher rate of return than that of other prominent hedge funds.

Squirrel AI Learning splits a knowledge point into super-nano-scale pieces. For instance, one rational number is split into 20 knowledge points. In real testing, Squirrel AI Learning extracted 10000 knowledge points from 500 test questions, with the accuracy exceeding 90%, increasing the whole test efficiency and learning efficiency by 5-10 times. The tinier a knowledge point is, the more thoroughly Squirrel AI Learning can understand each student's learning situation and the more easily it solves a problem.

The fourth characteristic of AI: Self-evolution.

Not only does Squirrel AI Learning teach knowledge, but it reasons out each student's learning method and ability and analyzes their number sense, innovative consciousness, thinking mode and reasoning ability in accordance with their degree of mastery of each knowledge point by calculating the distribution of knowledge points. Those abilities are exactly what need to be trained through education.

Technology maturity is the core-competitiveness of AI and the source of power for rapid self-evolution. Currently, Squirrel AI Learning has started actively developing cooperation internationally. Squirrel AI's Chief AI scientist Professor Tom Mitchell is the godfather of machine learning and the dean of the School of Computing CMU. Two years ago, Squirrel AI Learning established cooperation with SRI International. Later Squirrel AI founded a joint lab of AI Adaptive Education with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Squirrel AI Learning's technical strength has gained wide acceptance from the international community. In the past year, Squirrel AI Learning has had five of its technical papers collected internationally.

Squirrel AI Learning has opened more than 1800 learning centers across China. Latching on to the traditional education industry as an object of reference, human teacher-assisted Squirrel AI teaching has an immediate effect. Last year, Squirrel AI Learning held four human-machine competitions, where the Squirrel AI system and expert teachers taught students with the same learning foundation. The Squirrel AI teaching group defeated the human teaching group. The human-machine competitions drew widespread attention from inside China and abroad, and was reported by more than 100 international media such as CNBC, NHK, CCTV 2, Zhejiang TV and The Beijing News.

In August this year, Squirrel AI Learning held "Human-machine Competition in Hundred Cities". On average, each of the students in the Squirrel AI teaching group learned 42 knowledge points within 8 hours, while each of the students in the human teaching group learned 28 knowledge points within 8 hours.

Also, Squirrel AI Learning has made great efforts to solve the problem of educational inequity and resource imbalance. Not long ago, Squirrel AI donated 1 million learning accounts to underprivileged families and 10-million RMB worth of learning accounts to students in poor mountainous areas through the "Qingxiyuanshan Educational Charity Foundation".

"Definable, quantitatively assessable and teachable" are three standards set by Squirrel AI Learning, which uses a custom learning program to keep students away from rote learning, and cultivates their learning ability to make them well versed in what they have learned. Squirrel AI believes that in the near future, this scientific learning method will be able to help Squirrel AI Learning achieve rapid development in AI education in China and internationally under its slogan "let every student have equal education".

SOURCE Squirrel AI Learning