AI Education Company Riiid Launches AIEd Challenge

Riiid Labs, the global arm of leading South Korean AI-education company Riiid, has announced that the company will host the first-ever global AIEd challenge. The company hopes to jumpstart innovation within the field of education throughout the globe. 

The challenge will rely on the world’s largest education dataset, EdNet, which consists of more than 130 million interactions coming from over 780,000 students. EdNet will be offered to top researchers and scientists. 

YJ Jang is founder and CEO of Riiid. 

“AIEd today is just starting and it requires a practical approach to improve the quality of personalized remote learning,” said Jang. “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.”

The Competition 

The competition will award $100,000 to the winners and be a Kaggle algorithm competition. Scientists and researchers will be tasked with creating algorithms for “Knowledge Tracing,” which is the modeling of student knowledge over time. The major target is to accurately predict how students will perform on future interactions, and the participants will use Riiid’s EdNet data. 

The winning models will be featured in February at AAAI 2021 workshop. 

According to the company, the AIEd Challenge has two major guiding principles: achieving the highest levels of technical transparency and creating a more diverse and inclusive field. The AIEd challenge will aim to bring in youth from all economic levels and locations in order to expand access to educational opportunities. 

Jim Larimore is Chief Officer for Equity in Learning and Challenge Chair. He previously held leadership roles at ACT and the Gates Foundation. 

“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 Larimore. “We are constantly seeking for ways to translate our guiding principles into concrete actions that benefit all students anywhere in the world.”

Partnerships

Riiid Labs partnered with leaders in academia and important organizations in order to bring in more participants and improve the design of the AIEd Challenge. Included among those is Paul Kim, Chief Technology Officer and Assistant Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and Challenge academic advisor, as well as Neil Heffernan, professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and academic advisor. Some of the corporate partners are Ad Astra, ATP, Dxtera, Edmentum, Kaplan, Reboot Representation and SocialTech.ai. 

“The possibilities leveraging AI in varying degrees are infinite in every facet across the entire spectrum of education,” said Paul Kim. “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.”       

“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, who is VP of Partnership at Kaplan. 

Riiid began its worldwide expansion campaign a few months back after securing funding.

More details about the AIEd Challenge can be found here.