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Squirrel AI is an international educational technology company that specializes in intelligent adaptive learning and was one of the first companies in the world to offer large scale AI-powered adaptive education solutions. [1]
Squirrel AI uses artificial intelligence to tailor lesson plans to each individual student. [1] The company's AI researchers have access to the world's largest student databases, which are used to train the AI algorithms. [1]
Squirrel AI works with teachers to identify the most fine-grained possible concepts (“knowledge points”) for a course in order to precisely target learning gaps. For example, middle school mathematics is broken into over 10,000 points such as rational numbers, the properties of a triangle, and the Pythagorean theorem. Each point is linked to related items, forming a "knowledge graph". Each knowledge point is addressed by videos, examples and practice problems. A textbook might address 3,000 points; ALEKS, another adaptive learning platform, uses 1,000. [1]
Each student begins with a diagnostic test to identify where to begin their learning. The system continues to refine its graph as more students proceed. Learning is not student-directed. The system decides the order of topics.
Squirrel AI was founded by Derek Li in 2014. [2]
In March, 2017, The Squirrel AI Intelligent Adaptive Learning System (IALS) was launched. IALS utilizes artificial intelligence to customize lessons, practice and evaluations for each individual student. [3]
In 2018, Squirrel AI established a joint research lab of AI adaptive learning with the institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
By 2019, Squirrel AI had opened 2,000 learning centers in 200 cities and registered over a million students in Asia.
In 2019, Squirrel AI opened a research lab in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University.
As of 2019, Squirrel AI had raised over $180 million in funding and in 2018 it surpassed $1 billion in valuation. [1]
In 2020, Squirrel AI launched the $1 million AAAI Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity in partnership with AAAI. The inaugural award was given to Regina Barzilay for her work developing machine learning models to address drug synthesis and early-stage breast cancer diagnosis. [4]
In 2020, Squirrel AI established strategic partnership with DingTalk, Alibaba Group. [3]
As of 2021, Squirrel AI had served over 60,000 public schools, in over 1200 cities in Asia. [5]
Squirrel AI has gained recognition both in Asia and internationally including:
Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been involved in artificial intelligence (AI) research at MIT since 1964. His research has centered on understanding the problem-solving strategies used by scientists and engineers, with the goals of automating parts of the process and formalizing it to provide more effective methods of science and engineering education. Sussman has also worked in computer languages, in computer architecture, and in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design.
Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy is an Indian-American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over 50 years. He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was instrumental in helping to create Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in India, to cater to the educational needs of the low-income, gifted, rural youth. He was the founding chairman of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He is the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award, in 1994, known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, for his work in the field of artificial intelligence.
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artificial intelligence (AI), improve the teaching and training of AI practitioners, and provide guidance for research planners and funders concerning the importance and potential of current AI developments and future directions.
Cynthia Breazeal is an American robotics scientist and entrepreneur. She is a former chief scientist and chief experience officer of Jibo, a company she co-founded in 2012 that developed personal assistant robots. Currently, she is a professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the director of the Personal Robots group at the MIT Media Lab. Her most recent work has focused on the theme of living everyday life in the presence of AI, and gradually gaining insight into the long-term impacts of social robots.
Daphne Koller is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She was a professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient. She is one of the founders of Coursera, an online education platform. Her general research area is artificial intelligence and its applications in the biomedical sciences. Koller was featured in a 2004 article by MIT Technology Review titled "10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World" concerning the topic of Bayesian machine learning.
Richard S. Sutton is a Canadian computer scientist. He is a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta and a research scientist at Keen Technologies. Sutton is considered one of the founders of modern computational reinforcement learning, having several significant contributions to the field, including temporal difference learning and policy gradient methods.
Jaime Guillermo Carbonell was a computer scientist who made seminal contributions to the development of natural language processing tools and technologies. His extensive research in machine translation resulted in the development of several state-of-the-art language translation and artificial intelligence systems. He earned his B.S. degrees in Physics and in Mathematics from MIT in 1975 and did his Ph.D. under Dr. Roger Schank at Yale University in 1979. He joined Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor of computer science in 1979 and lived in Pittsburgh from then. He was affiliated with the Language Technologies Institute, Computer Science Department, Machine Learning Department, and Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon.
There are a number of competitions and prizes to promote research in artificial intelligence.
Manuela Maria Veloso is the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research & Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Head of the Machine Learning Department. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.
Daniela L. Rus is a roboticist and computer scientist, Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of the books Computing the Future and The Heart and the Chip.
The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is a leading international academic conference in artificial intelligence held annually. It ranks 4th in terms of H5 Index in Google Scholar's list of top AI publications, after ICLR, NeurIPS, and ICML. It is supported by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Precise dates vary from year to year, but paper submissions are generally due at the end of August to beginning of September, and the conference is generally held during the following February. The first AAAI was held in 1980 at Stanford University, Stanford California.
Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a British-American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Ng was a cofounder and head of Google Brain and was the former Chief Scientist at Baidu, building the company's Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people.
Eric Joel Horvitz is an American computer scientist, and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where he serves as the company's first Chief Scientific Officer. He was previously the director of Microsoft Research Labs, including research centers in Redmond, WA, Cambridge, MA, New York, NY, Montreal, Canada, Cambridge, UK, and Bangalore, India.
Ashok K. Goel is a professor of computer science and human-centered computing in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, and the chief scientist with Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities. He conducts research into cognitive systems at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive science with a focus on computational design and creativity. Goel is also the Principle Investigator and Executive Director of National Science Foundation's AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education and an editor emeritus of AAAI's AI Magazine.
Regina Barzilay is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a faculty lead for artificial intelligence at the MIT Jameel Clinic. Her research interests are in natural language processing and applications of deep learning to chemistry and oncology.
Cynthia Diane Rudin is an American computer scientist and statistician specializing in machine learning and known for her work in interpretable machine learning. She is the director of the Interpretable Machine Learning Lab at Duke University, where she is a professor of computer science, electrical and computer engineering, statistical science, and biostatistics and bioinformatics. In 2022, she won the Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for her work on the importance of transparency for AI systems in high-risk domains.
The MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health is a research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and health sciences, including disease detection, drug discovery, and the development of medical devices. The MIT Jameel Clinic also supports the commercialization of solutions through grant funding, and has partnered with pharmaceutical companies, like Takeda and Sanofi, and philanthropies, like Community Jameel and Wellcome Trust, to forge collaborations between research and development functions and MIT researchers.
Himabindu "Hima" Lakkaraju is an Indian-American computer scientist who works on machine learning, artificial intelligence, algorithmic bias, and AI accountability. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School and is also affiliated with the Department of Computer Science at Harvard University. Lakkaraju is known for her work on explainable machine learning. More broadly, her research focuses on developing machine learning models and algorithms that are interpretable, transparent, fair, and reliable. She also investigates the practical and ethical implications of deploying machine learning models in domains involving high-stakes decisions such as healthcare, criminal justice, business, and education. Lakkaraju was named as one of the world's top Innovators Under 35 by both Vanity Fair and the MIT Technology Review.
The AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity is an annual prize given by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence to recognize the positive impacts of AI to meaningfully improve, protect, and enhance human life. The award is presented annually at the AAAI conference in February. In its first two years, the associated reward was US$1 million, but has since been changed to $25000. Funding is provided by the Chinese online education company Squirrel AI.