Spring 2019 Hot AWS EdStart Startups – Machine Learning and Analytics Edition: Octopus BI, HelioCampus, Singsound, and Bibliotech

AWS EdStart members are creating products and solutions to improve teaching and learning and are using machine learning and analytics to advance global education. Octopus BI, HelioCampus, Singsound, and Bibliotech use AWS to revolutionize education analytics, language learning, and eBook distribution.

Read on to learn about these EdTechs:

Octopus BI: Octopus BI by Ayra Analytics is fuelled by one goal – to inspire students to reach their highest potential. To accomplish that, they empower schools with analytics that enable educators to help steer their students’ academic and personal success. Their solutions empower school decision-makers with the data they need to make smarter, better decisions so that they can create positive, progressive change.

“We leverage the power and potential of education analytics to turn schools into insight-driven institutions that herald a new era of education. We do this by using a purpose-built education analytics platform,” said Hansa Wijayasundara, CEO, Octopus BI.

HelioCampus: HelioCampus is a fast-growing data company working with the higher education community. HelioCampus offers a data platform and ongoing data science services that provide institutions with actionable solutions through integration and analysis of data across the student lifecycle, institutional financials, and more.

By helping colleges and universities use analytics to increase enrollment, improve student success, ensure financial sustainability, and accelerate gift giving, HelioCampus enables institutions to ask and answer their most pressing questions through data analytics, data storytelling, and data science. Originated within the University of Maryland Systems, HelioCampus offers a unique perspective on using data to facilitate meaningful conversations that fuel higher-value analyses and spur action, leading to greater institutional performance and financial sustainability.

“In less than three years, HelioCampus built a strong set of over 20 institutions that span higher education from state-level systems, research universities, small private colleges, and community colleges. In order to move fast, HelioCampus must have a platform that enables rapid implementation of the base platform. With AWS, we’re able to accomplish that in a matter of days versus the weeks or months it would take building locally. Additionally, our target implementation timeframe from contract to operation is 4-6 months. This would not be possible without the ease of initializing and configuring virtual private cloud environments available through AWS. Finally, the massive investment in physical and virtual security for data in transit and at rest by AWS creates a sense of trust among our data privacy -sensitive higher education client base,” said Bret Dennis, Head of Product Management, HelioCampus.

Singsound: Singsound is an artificial intelligence EdTech company focused on speech recognition and natural language processing technologies. They are currently providing speech assessment and essay grading services to Chinese educational institutions, so students can learn English. They have over 300 clients, including the top two education companies in China – TAL and New Oriental. Every day, over one million Chinese K12 students use our technologies to study English. Their platform processes more than 20,000 hours of speech data daily.

“A strong and reliable infrastructure is essential as we continue to research, develop, and build our AI-based language learning scenarios, which requires uninterrupted speech streaming and instant system feedback. Compared with other cloud service offerings, we believe that AWS’s industry-leading services and their ability to innovate at the fastest clip can help us strengthen our core services. AWS will also accelerate our efforts to apply AI in future business expansion, including speech synthesis, machine translation, emotional intelligence and identification, and virtual and ecological learning,” said Long Qin, Co-founder and CTO, Singsound.

Bibliotech: Bibliotech provides a modern eBook platform that integrates with existing university and library systems. Bibliotech’s app provides students with affordable and convenient textbook content on every device. With offline support, accessibility certification, synchronized comments and highlights, and a game-changing search engine that extracts information from images and graphs. Bibliotech’s mission is to enable students to learn and answer questions faster than ever before.

“We have over 330,000 titles in our library, performed tens of thousands of searches, achieved 30% user session growth each semester, 87% growth in time spent reading each semester, and millions of user interactions logged. With AWS, we can expand our user base and process vast quantities of content, without being concerned by resource limitations. At our peak, we were able to process over 50,000 titles in a single day, something we’d not be able to do without a distributed system,” said Daniel Engelke, CTO, Bibliotech.

Each of these companies are using machine learning and analytics on AWS to enhance their applications and advance student outcomes. To learn more about how our other members around the world use AWS, visit our webpage here.

AWS EdStart will be at ASU+GSV next week. Come visit us at booth #233 where we will be featuring our members – PikMyKid, edpuzzle, Hive Digital Minds, College Consortium, Play Posit, Singsound, Vocareum, Bloomsights, and Immersed Games.

Join AWS EdStart to learn about innovative and revolutionary new EdTechs at the upcoming AWS EdStart Pitch Days:

• Washington, DC | April 25, 2019 | Register Now
• Palo Alto, CA | May 23, 2019 | Register Now