Korean Edtech Startup Riiid to Establish AI-Education Database EdNet

South Korean AI tutoring solutions startup Riiid announced that it will be setting up an artificial intelligence-education database called Ednet, which seeks to drive the development of the AI-education industry.

In a statement, Riiid said the EdNet has been designed as an open database on diverse learning actions of unspecified multiple users. It will contain information on text exercises, responses for each test item, and data related to student actions, such as actual cores versus target scores, among others.

The startup said it will continue to release additional data on EdNet every year and host algorithm development challenges in various AI-Ed related tasks to attract more research talent.

“Despite enormous growth potential, the education sector is still lacking in AI research different from the finance and medical sectors. Mainly due to the conservative nature of the education sector, education data is rarely digitised,” YJ Jang, Riiid co-founder and CEO.

Additionally, Riiid announced that it has released 130 million interactions of intelligent tutoring system datasets that are specifically related to learning and test exercise data accumulated since 2017. The datasets are released through its solution called Santa.

“The release marks the largest among the ITS datasets released to the public so far,” the company said.

Riiid also released its knowledge tracing algorithm based on Transformer, a deep-learning module architecture, which predicts whether students will get questions right or wrong in a given exercise.

The startup said the open-source releases will allow further research of how Riiid’s models are programmed, as well as test accuracy and effectivity,” the company said.

Last December, Riiid, a member company of the Born2Global Centre, got the rare chance to present itself at the recently concluded AI Summit New York, one of the world-leading AI events aimed at global business leaders, according to a company statement.

Riiid was the only Korean startup to have attended the AI summit, which ran from December 11 to 12 at the Jacob Javits Center, and given the chance to deliver a keynote speech.

The startup recently secured $18 million in a Series C funding round led by Premier Partners, Alpenroute Asset Management, DSC Investment, IMM Investment, Korea Growth Investment Corporation, and D Ventures Private Investment Fund.