I first met my great Sri Lankan friend Aruna when working in Shanghai during 2003. After working for an extended period in Japan he is now back in Sri Lanka where he has founded his own business, Exam Genius, researching and developing new approaches to children’s education through the clever combination of cutting edge teaching research and state of the art computing technology. At the heart of all this is using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enable incentivised teaching tailored to each pupil and how they learn.
After years as a nascent technology and helped through the major players making their technologies open source (something that anyone so-minded can modify and further develop because its design is publicly accessible), AI is going through massive maturity growth. You probably use it already without realising when chatting online with major retailers or banks; the chance of the conversation being with a human being is increasingly slim – even when requiring fluent speech, not just written text. As we can see with enterprises like Exam Genius, this is just the beginning of what’s to come.
On Tuesday, Aruna launched the Exam Genius lab at The Holy Family Convent in Kalutara. You can read more about it here, but in short the lab is designed to help develop, refine and showcase his product through real usage. He has ambitions to become the standard product used within the forward-thinking Sri Lankan education system, and as the education system worldwide wakes up to the power of AI, to spread internationally. The industry is growing exponentially and he is up against tough competition from established players changing their business models, but knowing him as I do he has a very real chance of making his own business a real success. Agility and unique thinking are very much on his side.
He’d kindly delayed the launch by a day on learning that I was going to be airborne returning from the UK at the original time, and when Rennie and I arrived we found a lovely surprise as to why he’d done this; a Professor from the University of Colombo and myself were the guests of honour to cut the ribbon. I was very touched by this demonstration of friendship and enjoyed saying some words that came spontaneously from the heart rather than being scripted and rehearsed.
If you click this link and drag the progress bar to 18 minutes and 23 seconds you’ll see the short clip of the opening that made the evening television news. A funny story that the clip doesn’t show is that once the lab was open and blessed, 20 pupils took an exam where AI had assisted the teaching. You can see me sat as one of those “children”, but with the exam written in Sinhala script I was all at sea. I could correctly work out the four questions whose answers were visual (I looked for differences between the answer images and picked the one or more that were different from the others) but for everything else I played the law of averages and simply selected answer “B”. I passed with a grade C – in a subject I had not studied and in a language that I cannot read. Not so much artificial intelligence as a modicum of observation and lots of good luck; if the four responses to each question had been equally spread I should have failed with only 25% correct!
Steve
