Riiid Labs has announced the launch of the first-ever global Artificial Intelligence Education (AIEd) Challenge, created to accelerate innovation in education by building a better and more equitable learning model for students around the world.
“AIEd today is just starting and it requires a practical approach to improve the quality of personalized remote learning,” said YJ Jang, founder and CEO of Riiid. “The best approach starts by engaging with the world’s best machine learning and deep learning researchers in the AIEd field. By putting AI-powered learning solutions to work for all students, we aim to create a new model for education that is easily accessible, personal and individualized to meet the needs of any student at any level in school. We developed the AIEd Challenge to bring together the best minds in the world to help us all solve these challenges together.”
By giving access to leading researchers and scientists to the world’s largest hierarchical education dataset – EdNet, comprised of more than 130 million interactions between more than 780,000 students from Riiid’s AI tutor solution – the goal is to attract, encourage and reward the kind of innovation in AI education that ImageNet did in computer vision.
Designed as a Kaggle algorithm competition – with $100,000 awarded to the winners – the challenge to scientists and researchers is to create algorithms for “Knowledge Tracing,” the modeling of student knowledge over time. The goal is to accurately predict how students will perform on future interactions. Each contestant will apply their machine learning skills to the task using Riiid’s EdNet data. Winning models will be presented at AAAI 2021 workshop in February next year. The Riiid AIEd Challenge opens today. Instructions on how to participate can be found at this https://www.ednetchallenge.ai/.
The Riiid AIEd Challenge is committed to two major guiding principles: It aims to achieve the highest levels of technical transparency. Education is a field that demands the highest standards of all of us. Everyone in education benefits from greater due diligence by all major stakeholders, including teachers, parents, and students. Second, the Riiid AIEd Challenge pledges absolute commitment to diversity and inclusion. It is important, now more than ever, to create a level playing field for youth from every quarter and at all economic strata to benefit from educational opportunities.
“As the first step in realizing our vision, we will ask winners of the competition to submit reports on the most successful algorithms, which will include a transparent explanation of their models and how this research can be used to enhance transparency in AI Education,” said Jim Larimore, Chief Officer for Equity in Learning and Challenge Chair, who recently joined Riiid Labs, after recent education policy leadership roles at ACT and the Gates Foundation. “We are constantly seeking for ways to translate our guiding principles into concrete actions that benefit all students anywhere in the world.”
Global education is facing unprecedented challenges with Covid 19 pandemic. It is undeniable that the world needs a new paradigm in education. Artificial intelligence can play a transformative role in improving learning by helping teachers personalize the learning experiences of their students, reducing the time teachers must spend on repetitive tasks, and by making personalized learning resources available to students 24/7, regardless of whether school is open or not.
“The possibilities leveraging AI in varying degrees are infinite in every facet across the entire spectrum of education,” said Paul Kim, Chief Technology Officer and Assistant Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and Challenge academic advisor. “The Riiid AIEd Challenge will provide an opportunity for participants to carefully design AI that considers both educators and educational technology leaders and will be a great discussional platform for the AI-backed education ecosystem.”
To attract more participants and help contribute to the design of the Riiid AIEd Challenge, Riiid Labs partnered with some of the world’s most renowned academia as well as leading learning organizations. Paul Kim is joined by Neil Heffernan, a professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a leader in the field of educational data mining, to support this competition as an academic advisor. Institutional and corporate partners include Ad Astra, ATP, Dxtera, Edmentum, Kaplan, Reboot Representation, SocialTech.ai, and more.
“We’re excited to be a sponsor for this challenge and to help shape the future of learning. Now, more than ever, it’s crucial that data play a role in increasing access and equity across the globe. We are proud to partner with Riiid’s innovative team for the AIEd Challenge,” said Holly Garner, VP of Partnership at Kaplan.
Riiid, based in Korea, offers Santa, a mobile test prep application for the popular English proficiency exam, Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). Santa has been used by more than two million students in Korea and Japan, and reached No. 1 in sales among education applications in Japan and Korea. Riiid’s AI technology analyzes student data and content, predicts scores and user behavior, and recommends personalized study plans in real-time to help students optimize their learning potential.
Santa has proven the efficacy of Riiid’s technology and the company is now focused on providing back-end solutions for companies, school districts and education ministries around the world for a wide range of new learning applications.
Striving for technology leadership, researchers at Riiid are hosting a day-long workshop at the upcoming AAAI-21 conference in February 2021 where the Challenge winners will present their findings. Riiid also continues to research AI technology trends and publish papers at top AI conferences including Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurlPS), the International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU), and others. In early 2020, Riiid launched EdNet, the world’s largest open database for AI education to solidify global tech and industry leadership. The company has applied for 71 domestic and international patents, 17 of which are registered.
