In a classroom, children are loudly reading English words. On the big screen, the teacher is paying attention to each student's pronunciation. Sometimes, the teacher rewards the well-performing children, and sometimes uses humorous questions to attract the children's attention. This is the Fun English Class developed by TAL Group using artificial intelligence technology. The teacher on the screen is actually an AI teacher, which can promptly monitor the performance of all students in the class and interact with them in real time.

The AI teacher is one of the application scenarios of "artificial intelligence + education" explored by TAL Group. OCR intelligent grading, paper-pen interactive classroom, WISROOM smart classroom... Over the years, TAL has continuously delved into artificial intelligence to empower the development of education. In November last year, Hurun Research Institute released the "Top 100 Chinese Artificial Intelligence Companies in Intellectual Property Competitiveness 2019", which evaluated over 500 Chinese artificial intelligence companies from three dimensions: comprehensive strength, innovation ability, and technology maturity. TAL ranked among the top ten companies on the list.

Technological transformation, promoting industrial upgrading

As an important driving force for the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, the advancement of artificial intelligence technology has brought new opportunities for the development of education. In August last year, at the opening ceremony of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, the Ministry of Science and Technology approved TAL and other enterprises to build national new-generation artificial intelligence open innovation platforms. The open innovation platforms, driven by major demands of artificial intelligence, promote industry openness and sharing, and assist the growth of small, medium and micro enterprises. They will become the leading force for technological innovation and industrial ecosystem development in China's artificial intelligence field.

Huang Yan, Chief Technology Officer and President of the Open Platform Business Division of TAL Group, said, "Our smart education open innovation platform will be divided into three parts: technology empowerment platform, solution open platform, and industrial open platform. It will provide support for educational institutions, educational technology enterprises, and education practitioners in the industry in terms of establishing open standards for the smart education industry, providing full-scenario artificial intelligence capabilities, full-process artificial intelligence solutions, and full-cycle industrial applications. This will help the intelligent transformation and upgrading of the education industry."

Open platform, assisting the education cause

According to statistics, by the end of 2019, TAL's education open platform had served 4,500 educational institutions. Through products such as Future Magic School, LeWaijiao, and Live Classroom Cloud, TAL has transferred its 17 years of accumulated technological resources and high-quality teachers to 260 cities and regions in China. In addition, TAL also announced that it would open three industry solutions - AI classroom solutions, classroom teaching evaluation systems, and homework grading - 21 customized AI capabilities such as voice technology and image technology, as well as four scientific research data sets to the industry. "By building a smart education open innovation platform, on the one hand, it can effectively assist in achieving fair and quality education, and on the other hand, it can also promote educational reform and innovation," said Bai Yunfeng, Chairman and President of TAL Group.

To continuously promote educational progress, in recent years, TAL has continuously increased its investment in technology. In October last year, at the Sixth World Internet Conference held in Wuzhen, a screen attracted many viewers: while live-streaming a teacher's lecture, a set of data was used to evaluate the teaching situation in real time from several dimensions such as "affinity", "clarity", "smoothness", "interaction", and "key points". This is the "AI Teacher Training System" developed by TAL, which integrates voice recognition and facial expression recognition technologies. Teachers can adjust their teaching content and methods based on real-time scores to ensure a high-quality and fully interactive online classroom experience. Currently, this system has been applied in the training of TAL's own teachers at Xueersi Peiyou

Research and development increasing, covering more people

At present, TAL Education Group has nearly 8,000 technical, product and teaching personnel, as well as multiple departments such as the AI Engineering Institute, the Brain Science Laboratory and the Silicon Valley Center. It also conducts in-depth cooperation with domestic and foreign universities such as Tsinghua University, Beijing Normal University and Stanford University to jointly build multiple joint laboratories and research projects. On this basis, TAL Education Group has continuously made breakthroughs in the research and development of core technologies in the field of "Artificial Intelligence + Education", and has applied multiple technologies such as vision, speech, natural language processing and machine learning.

Based on the "AI Mandarin Learning System", TAL Education Group's Xueersi Online School has customized the "Pre-school Children's Yi-Han Bilingual Learning System" for Zhaojue County, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, which has been applied to nearly 80,000 students in the local area. The GodEye Classroom Quality Guardian System uses computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and data mining technologies to capture classroom data from different dimensions, greatly improving the coverage of classroom teaching assessment. The oral expression ability evaluation solution based on children's speech recognition technology and multi-dimensional oral expression evaluation algorithm has provided more than 30 million evaluation services, covering more than 5,000 teacher users and 1 million student users.

Zhang Bangxin, the founder and CEO of TAL Education Group, said, "In the future, TAL Education Group will explore more cutting-edge technology education, take more forceful open measures and carry out warmer industry cooperation to make education better with love and technology."