Artificial intelligence in education: UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize honours Brazilian and Spanish projects

18 mai 2020

Each year the UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa-Al Khalifa Prize rewards technological innovations in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in education. This year, the theme was Artificial Intelligence for Innovation and two laureates received awards: Letrus Writing Skills and Dytective.

The two winners of the 2019 edition of the UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa-Al Khalifa Prize for the Use of ICTs in Education are the Letrus Writing Skills programme developed in Brazil and the Dytective Dyslexia Screening Tool developed in Spain. Each winner will receive a prize of US $25,000 at a ceremony to be held shortly. The theme of the 2019 edition of the prize is the use of artificial intelligence for innovation in education, teaching and learning. Through this theme, UNESCO aims to promote effective and ethical applications of AI in education that are universally available. <strong>Letrus Writing Skills</strong>, developed by the Brazilian company Letrus, is a program using AI for automated feedback on student writing. Letrus aims to reduce functional illiteracy in the Portuguese language by improving practice opportunities for secondary school students and teachers. The program supports students' writing skills through hybrid AI-human feedback. Students receive immediate feedback from the software, which can identify writing patterns, and more detailed feedback from live proofreaders. Since 2017, more than 65,000 students have used the program in Brazil's 26 states. <strong>Dytective</strong>, developed by the Spanish company Change Dyslexia, is a tool capable of detecting dyslexia in Spanish in about fifteen minutes. It also offers exercises in the form of games for dyslexic learners to help them overcome their difficulties in writing and reading. The application includes a mix of online tests and associated predictive machine learning applications. To date, more than 270,000 children in 43 countries have benefited from free pre-diagnosis of dyslexia. Change Dyslexia also provides scholarships to disadvantaged families with dyslexic children. The two laureates were selected from 113 nominations submitted by governments of UNESCO Member States and UNESCO's partner entities, on the recommendation of an international jury of education experts. Established in 2005 and supported by the Kingdom of Bahrain, the prize annually rewards individuals and organizations that use digital technologies to improve teaching, learning and overall educational performance. The two winners receive a$ 25,000 prize and international recognition for their innovative use of digital technologies in education.

A prizewinners’ seminar with presentation of the winning projects will be organized on the occasion of the award ceremony, the date of which is still to be determined.

Translated from Intelligence artificielle dans l’éducation : Le Prix UNESCO-Roi Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa distingue des projets brésilien et espagnol