Korean Startup Riiid Presents Company Footprint at AI Summit New York

Korean AI tutoring solutions company Riiid 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, a member company of the Born2Global Centre, 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 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.

Riiid’s speech centered on the company’s successful footprint and its take on the future direction for research in AI-powered education and the education technology (Edutech) industry.

The speech, titled “Make Education Great Again” and delivered by Youngduck Choi, AI tech lead at Riiid, cited the shortage of high-quality data and low levels of consumer confidence in AI-drive education as the main factors causing the relatively slow pace of developments in AI research and development in the education sector.

Youngduck Choi said Riiid has been spearheading changes in the goal-oriented test preparation sector by successfully overcoming the identified challenges. He added that ‘technological transparency’ and ‘practical precision’ are crucial factors to ensure that AI technologies will be able to further develop and set the tone for the education sector.

“To spearhead industry-wide growth through technological transparency, Riiid has recently released more than 100 million pieces of users 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,” he emphasized.

Youngduck Choi also provided attendees in the AI Summit Riiid’s direction for AI research, highlighting 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.

Riiid 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.

The startup said it will be using most of its recently raised Series C investment to conduct R&D and further enhance its AI technology as a B2B solution known as santA.Inside.

Riiid was also the first Korean company to present a research paper on AI technology at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), the world’s most authoritative conference on artificial intelligence.