Recently, Liu Zitao, the Head of Machine Learning Algorithms at TAL's AI Platform, was selected for the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission’s 2020 "Beijing Science and Technology Nova Program," with his project on the integration and application of multimodal machine learning in smart education. This makes him the only young scientific talent representative from a tech-education company selected for the program this year.

Established in 1993, the "Beijing Science and Technology Nova Program" aims to foster scientific innovation through project-based development and to cultivate a cohort of young technological backbones with high political qualities, strong innovative capabilities, and a spirit of innovation. Since its inception, the program has accelerated the growth of young scientific talents, many of whom have become academicians, "Changjiang Scholars," and recipients of the National Outstanding Youth Science Fund, achieving significant innovative results.

As a representative in the tech-education field, TAL's frontier exploration and achievements in smart education were key factors in Liu Zitao's successful selection. The project's series of solutions, which impressed the evaluation committee, focused on applying AI technology to comprehensively analyze and optimize teaching quality, providing verifiable directions to address issues in the quality of online education content and learning experiences.

To tackle various challenges in online teaching, TAL innovatively combined the experience of its excellent internal teachers with multimodal multi-head attention mechanisms and Transformer deep semantic networks to provide automatic AI feedback on key teaching actions from over 10 dimensions such as speech emotion and questioning techniques. This assists teachers in adapting to online teaching and intelligently preparing online education lessons.

To provide students with professional language and thinking training and enhance their online learning experience, TAL independently developed a spoken language proficiency assessment solution in both Chinese and English. Based on advanced child speech recognition technology and multi-dimensional oral expression evaluation algorithms, the solution outputs assessment reports across dimensions such as fluency, emotion, content relevance, semantic logic, and language usage, offering more granular recommendations to help children understand their speaking ability levels and improve systematically. These solutions are widely used by TAL brands like Xueersi Peiyou and Xueersi Online School and are also open to other educational practitioners in the industry.

TAL's relentless pursuit of technology underpins these pioneering results. Adhering to the mission of "Making education better with love and technology," TAL is committed to ensuring that everyone has access to quality and equitable education. TAL continually increases its investment in technological R&D and has established development departments such as the AI platform, big data platform, brain science platform, and live broadcast platform. Collaborations with Tsinghua University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other institutions have led to joint laboratories and research projects. In early 2019, TAL received approval from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security to establish a postdoctoral research station, and in July of the same year, obtained approval from the Ministry of Science and Technology to build the National Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Open Innovation Platform for Smart Education. Currently, TAL has explored and formed over 100 AI capabilities covering all teaching aspects ("teaching, learning, testing, training, and assessment") and more than 10 AI solutions for educational scenarios.

This dedication has made TAL a fertile ground for the growth of scientific talents in the technology education sector, attracting numerous top-notch talents driven by educational ideals and focused on advancing education through technology. In recent years, TAL's technical personnel have participated in dozens of academic achievements selected for top international conferences like AAAI, WWW, AIED, and NCME. These individuals have also won numerous accolades, including championships at CVPR-EmotioNet, UbiComp, NeurIPS Education Challenge, and Chinese Computational Linguistics Conference CCL2020 competitions. Over 70% of AI platform technical staff have participated in paper and patent publications, leading to the practical application of various cutting-edge technologies.

For instance, TAL launched the TiPaPi photo-based question search software for primary and secondary schools, covering all subjects from elementary to high school, which features powerful search functions that quickly provide problem-solving ideas and detailed step analysis with a single photo. Tipaipai positions itself with the core feature of "When questions can't be found, teachers provide free answers," highlighting its key advantages through "Elite Tutors from Tsinghua/Peking Universities" and "AI-Powered Instant Solutions." The platform aims to democratize quality educational resources by offering free online problem-solving services, ensuring equal access to premium academic support for children across all income levels.

This selection of TAL’s scientific talent for the "Beijing Science and Technology Nova Program" reaffirms TAL's commitment to building its technology system. TAL will continue to embrace the responsibilities and mission of the era, promoting cutting-edge exploration in tech education with an innovative, open, inclusive, and shared approach, furthering the development of the education industry, and providing children with a more equitable and higher-quality educational experience.

Source: Phoenix Net https://biz.ifeng.com/c/81JZO7JgTS0