Don’t Just Play the Game, Make the Game: Taking Apps to the Next Level

What if you could change the way you do things just with the click of a button? Imagine that button allows you to create apps that are specifically tailored to your learning and behavioral needs. That seems ideal, especially if you want to be in control. Thanks to Founding CEO Leon Young and the cadre of experts at Cogniss, you now have the option to “build learning” and have fun in the process. The only limit is your imagination!

Tamara: Can you share a story that inspired you to get involved in AI?

Leon: Having worked on the front-line of digital education for the past 14 years, I’ve been largely underwhelmed by the application of technology to learning. So much of it has been about content distribution and process management, rather than using technology to deliver the best possible educational outcomes. Around a decade ago, adaptive learning systems started to emerge, but it quickly became apparent that adaptive learning was merely a simple way to personalize the consumption of traditional curricula. That’s useful for improving engagement amongst students with differing abilities, but on its own does nothing to improve the quality of knowledge acquisition, retention and application.

I was inspired to get involved because AI, combined with our emerging understanding of how the brain actually functions, creates a model for systems that engage and educate on a deeper, more impactful level. The integration of AI into education will form the foundation for edtech to finally begin delivering on its promises.

Tamara: Describe your company and the AI/predictive analytics/data analytics products/services you offer.

Leon Young, Founding CEO of Cogniss

Leon: Cogniss is an app-building platform that allows people to develop high quality learning solutions at much lower costs. It democratizes sophisticated app creation; anyone can use Cogniss to create their own AI-backed 2D, 3D, virtual reality or augmented reality app for education through a simple point-and-click interface. Following a successful beta testing phase, we will be launching version 2.0 of the platform in Q2 2018.

Powering Cogniss is a suite of AI engines grounded in cognitive science principles to ensure app users achieve optimal outcomes. They include the Cognission Engine (a machine learning algorithm that monitors user performance and perfectly levels the delivery of new information) and the Behavior Engine (which personalizes behavioral incentives and activity triggers).

Cogniss brings together complexity of function and simplicity of design, amounting to a Swiss Army knife for educational app creation. In addition to the visual app maker, the platform offers a single-identity social network where users can create profiles, browse the universe of available Cogniss apps, join teams, issue challenges and share milestones. It also features Cogniss Insights, a flexible data analytics tool that tracks and manages users’ learning or behavior change journeys.

Eventually, as the pool of data grows, Cogniss will apply deep learning to a broad range of data types, equipping educators, parents, administrators, and researchers with a new level of intelligence that can, for instance, help diagnose learning, cognitive and health issues early, test the efficacy of educational interventions, and enhance human decision-making generally.

Tamara: How do you see the AI/data analytics/predictive analysis industry evolving in the future?

Leon: Convergences of AI with new fields of knowledge and technologies will drive revolutionary shifts in how we perceive and deliver education and health interventions.

First is the convergence of AI with cognitive science. Algorithms anchored in research around how the brain processes, stores, and recalls information is making it possible for software to map individual learners’ cognitive data. It can also determine what we should be learning, and when, in order to optimize long-term knowledge or behavioral retention.

Secondly, the convergence of AI with innovative low/no-code development platforms is removing the barriers to more widespread creation and adoption of effective educational apps. Educational apps are typically bespoke solutions for a target learning behavior, and app development is a cost-intensive process, especially if the app has to compete with high quality, professional studio-made games. Now, through AI-powered low- or no-code platforms like Cogniss, anyone with minimal or even no coding knowledge can build complex educational software using a simple graphical user interface at a fraction of the cost typically required to employ custom developers.

Finally, the convergence of AI with big data analytics is powering a new generation of platforms and applications capable of processing billion of data points to help detect, track, predict and manage a dizzying variety of learning and health issues. We’re only just beginning to scratch the surface of the valuable insights that deep learning can extract from large, unstructured datasets.

The Cogniss Team

Tamara: What is the biggest challenge facing the industry today in your opinion?

Leon: The biggest challenge currently facing the AI and data analytics industry is how to properly grapple with and prevent the misuse of personal data. Recent high-profile data breaches have exacerbated people’s concerns over how data is being used to shape and impact their lives. There’s a clear expectation — imperative, even — for companies to embrace an approach to data privacy that’s radically user-centered, ethical and transparent. This has become a major point of differentiation in the industry.

Part of such an approach will involve formalizing an ethical framework that puts consumers in full control of what personal data gets shared, and recognizes that an AI-driven system is also only as reliable as the data it is given to work with. There needs to be concentrated efforts to control for potential hidden biases, a constant reviewing of the data being collected, and limits on how it should be used. How we mitigate the risks of AI should also be guided by human input from teachers, health professionals, ethicists, sociologists, and others.

Tamara: How do you see your products/services evolving going forward?

Leon: Cogniss is about much more than making sophisticated app creation accessible to everyone. It’s also designed to elucidate valuable learning, health, and behavioral insights by applying deep learning technology to a broad spectrum of datasets.

As more users engage with Cogniss apps, the platform learns to personalize each individual experience, recommending additional activities that will help them achieve their desired learning outcomes. And the more user-app interactions Cogniss captures, the more the platform’s AI can facilitate research into a backlog of critical questions around education and health that require datasets too complex for humans to process.

On the whole, the industry is shifting from the narrow, bespoke AI focused on executing a single, specific task, to broad AI, or systems that exhibit intelligent behavior across a range of purposes. Cogniss falls firmly into the second camp, built as it is to address virtually any learning or behavioral challenge using the same underlying software. With increasing amounts of data, from student performance levels, to physical and mental health indicators, to publicly available information such as population demographics, Cogniss will gradually evolve to fulfill its broader purpose as an intelligent predictive system capable of diagnosing learning problems before they become noticeable.

Tamara: What is your favorite AI movie and why?

Leon: 2001: A Space Odyssey. Seeing it as a child was a revelation. I was too young to understand the bigger questions posed by the movie (and perhaps still don’t), but the anthropomorphic depiction of HAL enthralled me. It still holds up after all this time because it encapsulates both the promise and the danger of AI.

Tamara: What type of advice would you give my readers about AI?

Leon: Invest the time into really understanding what AI, machine learning and deep learning are. They are conceptually complex and I find most people who don’t work in the area, who think they understand what these things are, really don’t. A conceptual understanding is necessary to fully appreciate the depth and breadth of the effects AI is starting to have on every facet of our day-to-day lives — in particular, how it will affect the job market as well as the broader economic and socio-political landscape of the future.

Tamara: How does AI, particularly your product/service, bring goodness to the world? Can you explain how you help people?

Leon: The convergence of AI with new technologies is revolutionizing the way we live our lives. Cogniss embraces this convergence by integrating AI, mobile, social networking, big data analytics and games into a single, affordable app-building platform. It empowers people and organizations wanting to innovate in education or health by letting them create their own AI-powered app solutions for a low monthly subscription fee, rather than fork out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to a custom developer.

People can count on Cogniss apps to help them effectively achieve learning outcomes because the platform is, at its core, a product of applied research. Its technology is informed by a panel of six leading academics and researchers specializing in a range of areas, from serious game design to sociology, psychology, education, virtual reality and cognitive neuroscience.

We’ve found many different applications for Cogniss, all of which help improve people’s quality of life in some way. Apps built on Cogniss are helping organizations grow emotional intelligence in children, improve cognition and slow brain ageing in the elderly, engage otherwise disengaged high school students, boost corporate sustainability, manage the adverse effects of problem gambling, improve compliance with medications, and collect data for clinical trials. That’s on top of the more obvious applications, such as STEM and literacy learning.

Tamara: What would be the funniest or most interesting story that occurred to you during your company’s evolution?

Leon: When I first conceptualized Cogniss, it was, as the name suggests, focused on creating educational apps around purely cognitive activities, like learning mathematics or languages. But once we got the model right, we found it worked for a far greater range of cases than we had imagined. Early after the release of our platform, we had customers using Cogniss to build solutions for things as diverse as brain training, to slowing the onset of dementia, to business simulation games.

What really amazed me was when I received a call from a young man by the name of Bart Atherinos. Bart wanted to build an app for young soccer players to foster mentorship and mindset development, and to deliver very specialised skills training. When he showed me his designs, it was like a light went on — I saw it fit the Cogniss model perfectly. That was a real turning point in realizing just how broad the application of this technology could be.

Tamara: What are the 3–5 things that most excite you about AI? Why? (industry specific)

Leon: Three things that most excite me about AI in the education industry:

1. AI offers myriad ways to provide instant feedback to students and teachers. Formative assessments now take the form of non-intrusive online quizzes, interactive videos, simulations, games and educational apps. When allied with a powerful AI-driven data system, these assessments can collect detailed insights into students’ concept mastery and problem-solving sequences, meaning key decisions about learning can be properly informed by continuous data. AI makes visible actionable data that previously would have gone unnoticed.
2. With data being collected on multiple fronts, AI can detect and analyze patterns across education, health and other indicators. For example, educators can access real-time information showing whether a student’s performance is being affected by inadequate sleep or emotional stress. Researchers can draw from an increasing volume of anonymized and public data to gauge the impact of certain interventions on certain populations. The more AI is applied, the more we will be able to address the nuanced learning conditions, preferences, weaknesses or backgrounds of individual students.
3. AI can assist learning institutions by automating a range of tasks, from record keeping, to lesson planning, to teaching, grading, and recommending activities. The time-saving nature of that is significant — AI can act as an extra pair of hands, freeing up educators to give individualized attention to students and field tough questions.

Tamara: What are the 3–5 things worry you about AI? Why? (industry specific)

Leon: Three things that worry me about AI in the education industry:

1. The increased use of AI in education raises the need to guard against misuse of student data. This will become more significant as AI becomes more widespread, and more people without a deep technical understanding are put in place to implement it. With data privacy becoming a universal concern, precautions like giving individuals effective controls over their own data will be crucial to building trust in organizations with access to that data.
2. There’s a danger that using AI to customize learning for individual students could exacerbate existing learning inequalities. In contrast to an education system that prioritizes standardization, AI-driven learning systems often tailor learning paths to students’ particular interests and aptitudes. However, AI can make mistakes — there’s a constant need to control for potential biases in the system that might say, pigeonhole students too early on, or not push students to do the things that will offer them the greatest long-term benefits.
3. The idea that AI will completely replace human educators can be counterproductive. With the unpredictability of technological advance, who’s to say AI will or won’t be able to perfectly emulate the interpersonal skills that teachers bring to the classroom, or how long that will take? Rather than think in terms of either/or, it’s more useful to think of AI as playing a key collaborative role alongside humans in the constant striving for our education systems to deliver the best possible outcomes.

Tamara: Over the next three years, name at least one thing that we can expect in the future related to AI?

Leon: The only thing we can expect for sure is the unexpected. The convergence of AI with other fast evolving technologies is going to have an exponential effect on the rate of change and the disruption of society at every level. What we really need to see in the next three years is a deeper understanding of the opportunities and risks presented by AI, and the development of models that facilitate progress in a way that serves humanity as whole rather than the interests of the few.