Abstract

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have spurred heated interests globally. The advances are mostly driven by the availability of big data, improved algorithms and computing power. Therefore, it would seem that companies with the most data assets and resources would have a significant advantage over the smaller market entrants. How can AI startups innovate and succeed in business? In this talk, I will share our story of building an AI company starting from zero to IPO. In particular, I will talk about the dilemma that AI startups typically face and what are the principles that we use to navigate through competitions and uncertainties and build a sustainable and scalable business.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Hui Lin is the Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Liulishuo (NYSE:LAIX), and a parttime professor at Shanghai University.

He developed the first few versions of Liulishuo’s automatic assessment and feedback engine that serves more than 80 million language learners. He now leads Liulishuo’s algorithm department with AI labs in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Silicon Valley. Liulishuo is one of the world’s leading “AI+Education” companies, and has launched an “AI English Teacher” based on deep learning, which provides a personalized and adaptive learning path for every learner. In 2017, Liulishuo has been selected as one of the top 100 AI company around the world by CB insights, one of the only two companies selected in the education category.

Hui Lin received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Tsinghua University in 2006 and his Ph.D. from University of Washington in 2011. Before founding Liulishuo, he was a research scientist at Google headquarter. His research area includes speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning and big data mining. He has published over 30 papers in these areas. He holds multiple patents in US and China. He invented a document summarization method based on submodular optimization, which has become one of the state-of-art methods for document summarization. During his time at Google, he worked on core speech recognition technologies, where he developed and launched a multilingual speech recognition system for Android and an automatic voicemail transcription system for Google Voice.