SHANGHAI, Dec. 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Liulishuo (FKA
LingoChamp), the world's leading "AI + Education" company, recently announced the opening of
its AI lab in Silicon Valley. Dr. Yang
Liu, the former research scientist at Facebook and professor
at the University of Texas at Dallas,
has officially joined as the head of the AI lab. This is following
the recruitment of Dr. Yi Sun – the
only Chinese disciple of AI pioneer and founder of the IDSIA lab
Jurgen Schmidhuber – who joined
Liulishuo in March 2017.
At the Series C press conference, CEO and co-founder
Yi Wang indicated that the company was planning to build a team of
top-tier talents in AI and Education in the next two or three years and establish a world-class
AI + Education lab. It now appears that the timetable is
accelerating.
Dr. Yang
Liu is a rare expert in the field of AI and NLP
(Natural Language Processing) with in-depth research and knowledge
straddling both academia and industry.
Prior to her move to industry, Dr. Yang
Liu invested more than 10 years of her time on AI and NLP
research in academia. Yang received bachelor's degree in 1997 and
master's degree in 2000 from Tsinghua University. Subsequently, she
continued her studies at Purdue
University and was awarded doctorate degree in 2004. Yang
was a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute
(ICSI) in Berkeley from 2002 to 2005. She started as an assistant
professor at the University of Texas at
Dallas in 2005 and became a tenured professor in 2011.
Dr. Yang Liu has published more
than 140 research papers in the field of Speech Processing and
Natural Language Processing. She received the National Science
Foundation CAREER award in 2009 and the Air Force Young
Investigator Program Award in 2010. Yang also served as editors of
top AI publications such as IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech,
and Language Processing, ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource
Language Information Processing and Speech Communication.
In order to enhance her research through real-world
applications, Dr. Yang Liu
transitioned from academia to industry. She joined Google Research
as a Visiting Scientist in 2015, and Facebook as a Research
Scientist in the Applied Machine Learning team in 2016.
10 years in academia and 2 years in industry drove Yang to
opportunities that encompass both a huge database with real user
feedback and forward-looking vision. Liulishuo ticks all the boxes,
and Yang's 10 years of friendship with Chief Scientist and
co-founder Dr. Hui Lin also
contributed to her decision to join the Company.
"Our AI lab and the team of experts are the core competency and
secret weapon to fuel our future growth in technology," said Dr.
Hui Lin, "and to attract talents
like Dr. Yang Liu is crucial to the
sustainable advantage of our lab. Our users, data, algorithm and
application form a closed loop, which is a rare find for those that
are interested in exploring the forefront of AI."
"Dr. Yang Liu's joining signals
that top global AI talents have begun to recognize leading Chinese
AI startups like Liulishuo. Our innovation in AI will be gradually
revealed in the upcoming products, which will allow users to
experience further efficiency boost powered by AI. "
Over the past few years since founding, Liulishuo has attracted
top technical talents from world-class IT
firms to join the Shanghai and
Silicon Valley offices. From now on, the battle for top
AI experts only gets fiercer from here.
Founded by Yi Wang, Hui Lin, and Ben
Hu in 2012, Liulishuo is the world's leading "AI +
Education" company. The Company has developed the world's first "AI
English Teacher" based on deep learning, which provides a
personalized and adaptive learning path for every learner. It is
proven to triple the learning efficiency (reduce the required
learning time to one third) compared to human teachers in the CEFR
standards (Common European Framework of Reference for Language),
according to a study using the TOEIC Bridge Test from ETS. The
Company's flagship mobile app product "Liulishuo" has more than 50
million registered users and over 600K paid users, from 379 cities in China and over 175 countries around the
world.
Liulishuo most recently completed the Series C round of
financing led by CMC Capital Partners and Wu Capital, with
participation from Liulishuo's earlier investors including IDG
Capital, GGV Capital, Cherubic Ventures, Trustbridge Partners and
Hearst Ventures.
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SOURCE Liulishuo