What is the future of education like? What will happen when traditional education meets AI? What kind of responsibility will future teachers take? Recently, these questions were discussed at the fourth International Conference on AI+ Adaptive Education (AIAED).

Held in Shanghai Tower this Tuesday (Nov.12), the conference focused on the possibilities of AI+ education in the future. The 2019 Education Intelligence Development Report was unveiled, stating that AI is exerting a disruptive transformation on traditional education. Using AI as an effective tool will help teachers and enable students to achieve better self-development.

The report also says that AI education, for the time being, is still under development, though it has been applied in many scenarios, like AI adaptive learning, man-machine dialogue, voice assessment, and intelligent language processing.

In fact, intelligent adaptive learning has been utilized in the United States and Europe for more than a decade. In comparison, China is slightly lagging behind in terms of accumulated data, and is still in the initial stage of development. However, as China has a large population, there will be a huge amount of data accumulated in the future. With more data, the training models will be more accurate.

Why is AI education so important? Bart Selman, professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and chairman of the Association for the Advance of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pointed out that AI systems will be a perfect complement to education in the future.

According to Derek Haoyang Li, founder of Squirrel AI Learning, “AI education is not about giving children a mountain of tests, but actually relieving them of the burden of study.”

“The essence of education is not teaching, but learning,” said Derek. He added that the application of AI can also promote educational equity. Take his company for example. There are over 2,300 Squirrel AI schools in over 700 cities and counties, as well as 69 towns. Children in remote areas can also get better teaching thanks to AI education.