Rocket Learning is bridging the tech gap with AI for young learners

Vishal Sunil, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Rocket Learning, says, “access to a smartphone, computer and the internet was a great indicator of a person having a higher income and leading a much better existence in this world. But now I fear AI will once again bring about a difference between the haves and the have-nots. We see a digital divide.” This is the divide the Rocket Learning wants to bridge, besides bringing up to speed the early learners, giving them a better foundation to make a mark in today’s AI-driven world. The non-profit aims to reinvent educator training and coaching by sending out bite-sized activity videos and learning modules over the social messaging platform WhatsApp.

Delivering lessons to the millions of underserved learners is both a worthy cause and a resource intensive process. To ensure that the targeted learners - mostly from government pre-schools - have easy access at the backend, Amazon Web Services (AWS) supports the workloads. Vishal says, “AWS has been transformative in our AI journey. The ability that Amazon SageMaker (a cloud-based machine learning platform) has to train and deploy models is unparalleled in any other cloud framework.” He knows it and has experienced this first-hand as Rocket Learning collects more than 50,000 worksheets a day and has millions of interactions with its users, all of which are seamlessly handled by Amazon Redshift (a data warehouse product), Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock (which offers a choice of high-performing foundation models).

Vishal himself had a solid foundation - first growing up in Chennai, then completing his schooling in Singapore, with a summer stint at Harvard. Although he studied statistics and economics, coding was his first love. “We were lucky to interface with computers at a very young age,” recalls Vishal. He later went to the University of Rochester where he really spread his wings, studying mathematics, computer science and economics. Around the time he was graduating in 2016, there was a movement towards ‘deep learning’. Technologies like face ID (identity) and computer vision were becoming big things and so Vishal decided to start his career as a data scientist.

“All my interests came in handy as a data scientist,” says Vishal.

Of equal importance to Vishal was making contributions in areas which can help improve lives. He took to entrepreneurship, founding two ventures before Rocket Learning. The first was Parfect Market in 2017, an investment management platform and marketplace with an aim to promote economic mobility and stability for middle income individuals. In 2018, he co-founded Kestrel Agritech to help farmers reduce crop loss through automated pest detection and control, using real time thermal surveillance via drones. All of these factors - his education, entrepreneurial experiences and his need to contribute to the greater good - neatly dovetailed into his career of choice at Rocket Learning.

“I like to explore and take risks. These ventures taught me the value of product market fit, the value of prototyping and testing out ideas,” says Vishal. This is when he met Azeez Gupta, co-founder Rocket Learning. Both Vishal and Azeez had a common desire to impact people using technology, which eventually resulted in Rocket Learning.

Human-centric approach to learning

Rocket Learning is a non-profit, with a human-centric approach to AI design. They are creating personalized engagement pathways for each parent and child, through localized content in key Indian languages. Elaborating on their human-centric approach Vishal says, “audio-visual, voice-based communication has been prevalent in India, for thousands of years. Even the great tales in our history were passed down via voice. On WhatsApp, people use voice notes, videos and so on. So having a ChatGPT kind of interface, behind a paywall, limits the use to white-collar spaces excluding the masses. So our idea was "how can we bring learning naturally to everyone’s sphere?”

Vishal pointed out that low-income communities lack the time to evaluate something without a purpose. Often they are struggling to make ends meet to educate their children. “So, with all this in mind, human-centric AI addresses their unique requirements. It's about how you can make a difference to their lives without them intentionally using AI,” he explains.

As for the evolution of AI systems Vishal believes it will get very good at acting human-like, simulating and creating sentences. And in future, the trust in these systems will go up. He believes that as time goes by, the learning modules that Rocket Learning is creating will also improve with use of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). Vishal sees smartphone cameras becoming AR and VR devices. “Even as that improves, we will keep our focus on design for users who always get left behind when such big shifts happen,” adds Vishal.

To ensure that he is up to speed with the latest developments in the AI space he keeps his ear to the ground. He found scientist and computing pioneer Stephen Wolfram’s book, What is ChatGPT doing:…and why does it work? To offer a soothing explanation of all the recent work around AI, particularly from a mathematical perspective. Besides, being part of the AWS community helps. “Many top companies tend to lean on AWS. So when we go to their conferences we meet a lot of heads of AI and data science experts and these interactions also help in expanding the knowledge base,” says Vishal.

Outside of work, Vishal likes to try out 3D printing. He has been prototyping small things. “When you are able to see things, it offers a very different perspective, compared to just having models float around,” says Vishal. He is trying to 3D print small products in either robotics, air purification or similar spaces.

While he hones his skills at 3D printing, he is also looking ahead. By 2030, Vishal sees Rocket Learning impacting 50 million children. At present India has about 45 million children who get no early education whatsoever. For Rocket Learning to change that and make a significant improvement in that figure is a big goal.

At present, Rocket Learning is impacting around 3 million children and parents in government pre-schools in 140 districts in ten states. Beyond just educating children about AI, “it's really important that we teach them the fundamentals of AI and how to deal with systems that can think on their own. Education has to play a big part in this journey. More so as the job market is also evolving and children should be well equipped for this change,” he concluded.