An article from WSJ shows us the new vision of Chinese AI market this week. A Chinese startup named iPIN which is a new face to the top-tier AI conference, AAAI-17, got two papers presented at this conference. Besides iPIN, Chinese giants like Baidu, Huawei, and Tencent also has their papers accepted.
According to Venture Scanner, 2016 was a significant year for AI startups with over 1485 startups received investment globally. And thanks to their national entrepreneurship policy, China and India supplied a lot of AI momentum. However, compared to their western rivals such as Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana or Amazon’s Alexa, Chinese companies may still be a long way away from mass-market practical usage.
But AI startups are facing the big problem. Many AI startups are still trying to find a niche where machine can be deployed at a more cost effective and easier way than humans could have ever achieved. Not all startups like Tesla which can trigger the autopilot market by its self-driving technology.
Dr. Yang Yang, CEO of iPIN, spoke at the conference, noting that some of the more agile startups are positioned to perform better than big-name established enterprises. iPIN was founded in 2013 which is three years before the 2016 AI capital influx took shape. This company built a GPS-like system in career development based on its talent database, which helps customer choose a better career path with AI. During the University Application period of 2015 in China, iPIN helped over 2 million freshmen-to-be to get their coveted admission letters. Till now, their AI have served over 5 million Chinese students.
Dr. Yang, a serial entrepreneur who worked in the National Laboratory for Tourism & e-Commerce and the Fox Business School of Temple University, has lots of experience of collective intelligence and data analysis for business purpose. They are devoted to building a Chinese Watson, a business cognitive analysis platform which can complete the job of information analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning. IBM Watson is one of the most mature AI product in the market. According to TechCrunch early this month, IBM worked with H&R Block to help people reduce the time they consume on tax deduction and all its often monotonous calculations. Watson also helps researchers conduct medical studies and provides artificial program interfaces (APIs) for developers to build virtual assistants. Though they are both powerful artificial intelligence platforms, iPIN is currently focusing on education and human resources – more specifically splitting it services into three categories – human resources, career development and legal services.
But what makes Mr. Yang Yang most proud and passionate is education, “My co-founder Pan Rong and I are both associate professors. We have been concentrating on talent training and education. Freshmen-to-be have no clue about their major career path and work type before they choose universities, which led to 71.2% of Chinese undergraduates failed to find a major-related work after their graduation. We want iPIN to help students make plans for their careers through early AI Career Development intervention, so as to cut down the mismatches between career and major.”
“Adopting Artificial Intelligence, Business Intelligence, and Collective Intelligence to analyze personal connections and career development plan,” Dr. Yang told us the methodology of iPIN. And he also explained, ” We believe AI+BI+CI will be the market trend this year. Our mission is to offer Chinese customer and business the most sophisticated Knowledge Work Automation technology on their finger-tips, especially in education, human resources, and legal service.”
AI is a hard race for startups. However, iPIN is ready to fight since they understand their customers’ needs and bring them value and business opportunity. The market loves these AI products. iPIN and New Oriental Education & Technology Group (NYSE:EDU) had reached a strategic partnership last year to provide AI+Education service to more students. As the largest education insititution in China, New Oriental provided various training courses to over 20 million students and more will enjoy AI’s guide.
Their University Application product Perfect Application （Wan Mei Zhi Yuan） will be used by millions of students this summer. And their Career Development product will be released next month, also their Profession Planning product is also slated to be rolled out later this year.
Media Contact
Company Name: IPIN Inc.
Contact Person: Tracy Wang
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +8618501981447
City: Shenzhen
Country: China
Website: http://www.ipin.com
