SHANGHAI, China, Dec. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Recently, a two-day Singularity University’s Abundance 360 summit was held in Shanghai. The $7,000 admission fee didn’t stop people from learning. All seats were occupied. People from top international investment banks, founders of unicorn tech companies, founding partners of leading foundations and senior management of Fortune 500 tech companies gathered together to listen to the world’s most cutting-edge technologies and business theories. Derek Haoyang Li, founder of China’s Squirrel AI Learning by Yixue Group, was a keynote speaker for this summit. He decrypted the logic and method of AI subverting traditional industries and how to make smart decisions with AI in each traditional industry from the perspective of knowledge map construction, user portrait labeling, algorithm modeling, etc., which was well received by the attendees.
Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive education system is the first AI intelligent adaptive learning engine with complete proprietary intellectual property rights based on advanced algorithms in China. It can simulate special-grade (the nationally-renowned teacher titles given by the government) teachers, use five core technologies, including genetic algorithms, neural networks and machine learning, to improve or accelerate students’ learning results.
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Singularity University is an university jointly opened by Google and NASA for training future scientists. More than 4,000 people from 120 countries apply to this university each year, but the acceptance rate is only 2%. In Singularity University’s list of lecturers, there is Brad Templeton, an adviser to Google Driverless Car project, and Neil Jacobstein, who once was a technical adviser to AI projects of institutions such as DARPA, NSF and NASA. Abundance 360 is a popular high-tech summit in the USA, initiated by Dr. Peter Diamandis in 2013 to provide an exchange and mutual learning platform for “disruptive technologies that bring solutions to the challenges to the fate of mankind.” Covering AI, robotics, infinite computing power, broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, synthetic biology and other exponential growth cutting-edge technologies, it is a wind vane for global future exploration.
At this Abundance 360 summit in Shanghai, apart from Singularity University’s founder Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, who gave lectures in person, Hyperloop One’s CEO Robert W. Lloyd, Celgene Cell Therapy’s founder Bob Hariri, Wantong Group’s founder Lun Feng, BGI’s co-founder Jian Wang, Squirrel AI Learning’s founder Derek Haoyang Li and other successful entrepreneurs in various fields also made presentations, giving attendees an audio-visual feast about the future of technology.
At the summit, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis gave lectures titled “Exponential Growth and Anti-Scarcity Thinking” and “Frontiers of Science and Technology with Exponential Growth” in succession. He talked about the exponential growth thinking, anti-scarcity thinking, a new interpretation of the resource crowdsourcing model, 6D+ scarcity-to-abundance tool, computer science, sensor technology, Internet of Things, biotechnology, AI, longevity science, robotics, blockchain and other cutting-edge technologies and discussed how to use technology to increase wealth, manage wealth and influence the world. Wantong Group’s founder Lun Feng, BGI’s cofounder Jian Wang and Squirrel AI Learning’s founder Derek Li respectively shared their corporate research achievements in changing by leaps and bounds, longevity science and AI and other related technologies.
In Derek Li’s opinion, after nearly sixty years of development, AI technology has made breakthroughs in many areas and has been extensively used in medical care and education scenarios. It has broad application prospects. According to the data released by iResearch, the global AI market will be around 119 billion RMB in 2020; in the next 10 years, AI will be a $200 billion market, with a huge space for development. Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive education system has been used by 1 million students in more than 300 cities of more than 20 provinces in China. Its revenue is expected to exceed $200 million in 2018. In the future, AI will penetrate more deeply into everyone's life and reform every industry. This is the trend.
Specifically, AI is able to subvert traditional industries mainly because of four dimensions: it's versatile and know-it-all; it can tell big stories from small things; it has infinite computing power; it’s self-evolving, as Derek Li says.
First, it's versatile and know-it-all. AI has remarkable performance in many industries. For example, IBM Watson is one of the most mature cases at present. In 17 seconds, it can read 3,469 medical monographs, 248,000 papers, 69 treatment regimens, 61,540 trial data, 106,000 clinical reports and finally provide the best treatment regimen for the patient. IFLYTEK’s AI simultaneous interpretation has reached a high level and refreshed the records set by the Americans and the Japanese. It predominates in English-Chinese translation and Chinese-English translation. Aided by AI systems and communication tools, autonomous vehicles can solve the problem of traffic congestion and drive freely on high streets and back lanes. It’s all because AI is versatile and know-it-all.
In Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive learning system, this feature of AI is reflected in the nanoscale breaking down of knowledge. Through the knowledge map, information theory and Bayesian theory, it can identify each student's learning level accurately in the huge knowledge database and know the knowledge points that a student has mastered or has not mastered anytime anywhere. Aided by AI, Squirrel AI can break down knowledge points into more fine-grained level. For example, it can break down the concept of rational numbers into more than 20 knowledge points, which is completely impossible for most human teachers.
Second, small things can tell big stories. There is a saying that details determine success or failure. AI can analyze details to give people some advice. For example, Toutiao recommends content based on its users’ big data and intelligent algorithms, to provide users with personalized news content. The Lettuce Bot made by two engineers from Stanford can drive tractors and take photos of plants on the way. Using multiple computer vision algorithms, it compares the photos with more than 1 million pictures in its database to identify weeds and over-dense plants, and sprays high concentration fertilizer to sweep them away, saving over 90% of herbicide expenditure. Face++ can draw user portraits and identify each individual through details in the eyes, nose and eyebrows.
Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive learning system uses AI to change the “standard” learning model in traditional education. It treats every student differently, carefully analyzes the defects in their knowledge points and then provides a more personalized learning program for each student through AI algorithm matching. On the basis of clear learning objectives, the system helps students improve their learning efficiency and achieve fast increases in score in the end.
Third, AI has infinite computing power. On the basis of collecting big data, AI shows its infinite computing power in various industries. It can obtain more comprehensive analysis results in a limited time. For example, it took Watson system only 10 minutes to complete a report of possible clinical treatment options for a tumor patient, but it took the expert group 160 hours to finish manual analysis and get a similar report. Before defeating AlphaGo by a score of 100:0, Alpha Zero played hundreds of millions of games against itself. It’s impossible without infinite computing power.
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What about Squirrel AI? Education is a much more complex project. Each student has a different intelligence level and education background. The same student has different concentration and learning efficiency in each class. Human teachers alone cannot accurately figure out each student's mastery of knowledge points. But with infinite computing power, Squirrel AI can absolutely do it. On this basis, it can develop a personalized learning path for each student, so that they can learn more efficiently.
At last, AI is self-evolving. The most remarkable achievement of AI is its ability to evolve. AI can even be more creative than humans. Therefore, Musk and others put forward the “AI threat theory”. Apart from social and ethical concerns, the evolution of AI indeed shames humans. When Microsoft Xiaoice took out her collection of poems Sunshine Misses Windows for publishing, her poems might seem a bit immature to some experts, it indeed subverted humans’ absolute control in the fields of art and aesthetics. In the education sector, the evolution of Squirrel AI is also amazing. It has various skills that human teachers don't have. It can help students fill up their knowledge gap and stimulate their creativity and imagination automatically.
Based on the above “four features” of AI, AI intelligent adaptive education has swept the world. Squirrel AI Learning has organized four “human vs. machine” teaching competitions to show the effectiveness and universality of intelligent adaptive education. In the latest “human vs. machine” competition in 100 cities, in terms of the average score increase, the machine-taught group increased 5.4 points on average, while the human-taught group increased only 0.7 points on average. In the same 8 hours, the machine-taught group students mastered 42 knowledge points on average, while the human-taught group students only mastered 28 knowledge points on average. At present, Squirrel AI represents the highest level of intelligent adaptive education in China.
The victories in the human vs. machine competitions are inseparable from Squirrel AI R&D team’s efforts. Squirrel AI has gathered scientists from Knewton, ALEKS and RealizeIT, the world’s top three AI-powered education unicorn companies. It has established an AI-powered education lab in New York and a joint lab for AI in Silicon Valley with Stanford Research Institute (SRI). As a result, Yixue Education Group can develop the Squirrel AI intelligent adaptive learning system with full proprietary property rights on the basis of the concept of machine learning and adaptive learning of AI.
This wasn’t the first time for Squirrel AI Learning’s founder Derek Li to share his experience at a Singularity University’s summit. At the Singularity University Annual Summit held in August of this year in San Francisco, USA, Derek Li already exchanged ideas with many experts, professors and scholars on the topic that AI-powered education will push future education to exponential growth.
He thinks: “A perfect education system not only needs to help children acquire new knowledge, but also needs to train their learning transfer ability, creating opportunities for them to practice critical thinking, develop their creative problem-solving skills and effective learning habits.” AI will play a big role in personalized education, thinking training and other aspects to promote the reform of education in the future.
Today, a storm of “AI +” is coming. Only by grasping the pulse of the times can entrepreneurs build great enterprises that can change the future of mankind. The ultimate goal of Squirrel AI Learning is to let every child have an AI teacher like a combination of Socrates + Da Vinci + Einstein, to make boring education become a very intriguing one.
About Squirrel AI Learning
At present, Squirrel AI Learning already has more than 1 million users. Next, it will develop an OpenAI platform, so that all institutions and individuals no longer need to develop their own intelligent adaptative systems. In addition, Squirrel AI Learning will offer 1 million learning accounts to children from poor families for free.
To learn more about Squirrel AI Learning, please visit http://www.squirrelai.us/.
Guangming Yang
yangguangming@songshuai.com