Liulishuo (FKA LingoChamp) Sets up AI Lab in Silicon Valley

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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