POSITIVO M.IA — The customer, its challenge and the solution
Positivo Group was founded in 1972 to prepare students for college entrance exams. With headquarters in Paraná state – South of Brazil, Positivo has grown into a 45 thousand-employee holding, today comprising different business lines, including education, IT technology and a print shop/publishing company specializing in education, which — among other didactic and literary works — issues the best known Portuguese language dictionary, Aurélio, since 2003.
In the education field, today Positivo owns 14 educational units in Paraná and Santa Catarina states, devoted to primary and secondary education, with 20 thousand students. As for college-level education, Positivo has 65 thousand students in its different campuses. In addition, it has agreements with 1,500 education institutions throughout Brazil that use Positivo’s adaptive learning methodology to offer education to approximately 1.5 million students. Positivo also has agreements with 20 educational institutions in Japan that use its methodology to provide education in Portuguese and Japanese for a large Brazilian-Japanese community, since Brazil is home to the largest Japanese population outside Japan.
Positivo is always seeking to improve its adaptive learning methods and technology, and that is why it has approached ITCore, as states the Grupo Positivo CIO, Elizimar Polizelo. The adaptive learning methodology Positive adopts is committed to promoting the most effective learning processes individually for each student. And AI and machine learning can be powerful tools for this objective, as the ITCore M.IA solution have been demonstrating in the Positivo project.
Positivo began to deploy the project in the second half of 2018, and it is already showing good results, as ITCore’s facial recognition technology has been customized to meet Positivo’s demands:
“We are introducing a whole new concept in education, based on the interpretation of the student’s attention to lessons and learning activities, as well as on their feelings in the classroom, through facial recognition. The Implementation of the project has been quite an achievement. It’s an absolutely innovative idea and we had nothing similar to use as a reference. With the partnership of ITCore, we have overcome every challenge in a brilliant and pleasant way”, says Polizelo.
The pilot project was first run in Colégio Internacional, a bilingual Portuguese-English school Positivo owns in Curitiba city. The first advantaged noticed was the gain of 20% more time for the teacher’s lessons just because roll call is no longer necessary: M.IA recognizes the faces of the students present in the classroom to take attendance and automatically creates the appointment in the academic management system.
However, the project’s main objective is the continuous improvement of the learning process to the benefit of the student. Thus, in its second phase M.IA’s “facial recognition and computer vision” resources were employed to ascertain whether the student was paying attention or not, happy or sad, in a word: to detect their mood and cross this information with the teacher’s, assessing how the teacher/student interaction is benefitting or impairing the learning process, explains the Grupo Positivo CIO. “With this project we continue to innovate teaching methodology,” he says.
“ITCore has very successfully customized the technology they have developed to meet our needs and goals. I see the Positivo – ITCore as a very productive and promising partnership, to bear fruit for us both.
“Our next steps will be to expand the use of M.IA into other units and to continue using the ITCore solution to improve our adaptive learning methodology and to involve parents in the process, giving them a better idea of how their children are doing in school,” says Polizelo.
M.IA – ITCore’s Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Analysis solution for the education market
The most immediate uses of M.IA for Education —the Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Analysis solution IT has developed for the education segment—can detect the students’ presence in the classroom and assess each student’s engagement level and emotions of.
We believe that M.IA is a highly innovative solution. The solution was used to develop the ability to use artificial intelligence to improve the students’ experience in the classroom and to focus on the continuous improvement of the level of learning.
Since M.IA works by means of artificial intelligence as “face recognition and computer vision”. M.IA uses machine learning algorithms that allows for predictive behavioral analysis with likely significant future new outcomes. As it detects and identifies emotions, it helps perceive socio-behavioral traits that can point out potential risks in the student’s conduct. We expect that our solution can evolve to the point where we can help prevent bullying or recognize the threat of drug involvement early in the students we monitor.
M.IA already takes into account the Brazilian General Law for Data Protection (GDPR). M.IA does not retain the students images it analyzes. Moreover, by teaming up with specialized law firms we are ready to offer our customers legal support to make sure they are compliant with the data protection law.
M.IA and the Microsoft Solution
The M.IA for Education solution was developed with Microsoft solutions and integrates with Artificial Intelligence, Microservices and open source solutions.
The M.IA was developed using as a basis Education Solution, Data & AI, Cloud Data Platform, Open Source, Intelligent Cloud Azure, Data and Analytics, Power BI.
Microsoft Cloud Solutions:
- Cognitive Services (Face API)
- Cognitive Services (Computer Vision)
- Containers (docker)
- Azure Face Cognition (Edge on Device)
- Azure Database for SQL (PaaS)
- Azure Data lake
- Azure Databricks
- Azure Data Factory
- Azure Blob Storage
- Azure App Service
- Azure Web services
- Azure Functions
- Azure Application Insights
- PowerBI Embed
- Azure B2C
- Azure Active Directory
- Power Apps
- Office 365 integration (Check-in / Checkout classroom)
- GraphQL
- Prisma
- Javascript (nodejs)
- Subscription (apollo-transport-ws)
We are currently working with a roadmap aligned with Microsoft technologies, providing constant updates to our product like, “Cognitive Services – Edge Face API and Computer Vision” to provide a better experience and identity in the treatment of our students’ images, aligning with privacy and data protection laws.
We also run the same PoC at INSPER University in São Paulo – Brazil
WEBSITE MIA – https://www.itcore.com.br/solucoes-em-ti/itcore-mia-educacional
Press release – https://nethics.wixsite.com/nethicsedu/internetdascoisas?fbclid=IwAR1zRBnpIk-l7g9C5wOMzs4-IDjNr–cQ3RCAA41desqtPxvY4D510DuGzI