Riiid, a Korean startup that is a global leader in AI tutor solutions, participated in the AI Summit New York, from December 11 to 12, 2019, at the Jacob Javits Center. Riiid, the only Korean startup at the AI Summit, delivered a keynote speech, presenting the firm’s successful footprint, the future direction for research in AI-powered education and the EdTech industry.
The AI Summit, one of the world-leading AI events aimed at business leaders, is held annually in San Francisco and New York in the US. It provides a platform where industry leaders gather to discuss the latest developments in AI technology, its applications and the direction for future development.
Presenting the power of AI-Enabled EduTech to a global audience
Riiid came to the fore as the only startup specializing in AI-enabled education. Through the keynote speech titled ‘Make Education Great Again,’ Riiid attributed the relatively slow pace of developments in AI research and deployment in the education sector to the shortage of high-quality data and low levels of consumer confidence in AI-driven education. The startup underlined that Riiid has been spearheading changes in the goal-oriented test preparation sector by successfully overcoming these hurdles.
Riiid continues research efforts to enhance AI functions based on user interactions data collected from more than 1.1 million accumulated users through ‘Santa’, the firm’s first commercialized AI tutor solution. At the same time, Riiid provides convincing substitutes to conventional human-led education such as private institutes and online courses by demonstrating with proven data how solely AI-powered prediction, content recommendation and motivation stimulation led to improvements in test performance.
In its presentation at the summit, Riiid emphasized that ‘technological transparency’ and ‘practical precision’ are crucial factors to ensure that AI technologies will be able to develop further and set the tone for the education sector.
Youngduck Choi, AI tech lead at Riiid, presented, “To spearhead industry-wide growth through technological transparency, Riiid has recently released more than 100 million pieces of user interactions data obtained from Santa as well as the firm’s knowledge tracing model based on Transformer, a deep machine learning module, which predicts whether the students will get questions right or wrong in a given exercise.”
Further, he said, “Although releasing the firm’s key assets as open source was a difficult decision to make, we believe it will contribute to overall market growth by building industry-wide trust and stimulating research activities across different aspects in the field.”
Youngduck Choi presented the firm’s direction for AI research that the fundamental goal of test-preparation should be the achievement of each user’s target score in a given time constraint, rather than a general improvement in test scores or level of conceptual understanding which is rather implicit. He addressed that the reinforcement learning algorithm maximizes the probability of individual users achieving the target at test time.
The presentation received a warm response from the audience. “I knew Korea is very competitive in the test preparation sector. Still, it is amazing to see how advanced it is in AI convergence research and commercialization in the field,” said an attendee working for a US government-sponsored financial institution. “I am planning to take GMAT in the near future. If GMAT prep solutions are available, I want to give them a try”.
In its fourth year, the AI Summit New York brought together global tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and IBM and leading companies from different industries such as PayPal, JP Morgan Chase, PepsiCo, ExxonMobil, MasterCard, and Walmart to share their experiences in AI deployment.
