[Abstract]

Elice is a software development company founded by three graduate students in 2016. At the early stage, Elice was just a proof-of-concept platform for automating the daunting grading process. In five years, Elice became a corporation with sales of 10 billion won (~7m usd), and expected to record 30 billion won of sales this year. How the three co-founders grew the company, and what have they learned from the graduate school? In this talk, as a co-founder of Elice, I will share the stories of starting up the team and how we worked so far, in the viewpoint of graduate students.

[Biography]

Suin Kim develops Elice, an online computer science education platform. As a co-founder and Chief Product Officer, he leads both platform and content development in Elice. Elice has many business areas, from infrastructure including GPU farms and data centers to platform for education and recruitment, and DX (digital transformation) in the B2B field. Suin’s primary interest is integrating all three pieces together — infrastructure, platform, and educational contents — for the adoption of digital technology by the sociecty.

Suin’s research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and computational social science. He analyzes the student’s data collected from Elice, including the set of intermediate codes and messages while solving the exercise, to understand the learning process. He majored in topic modeling, a subfield of machine learning, which can find meaningful patterns of social interactions from large, un-annotated datasets. His prior work includes nonparametric topic models to discover and analyze patterns of language usage, emotions, sentiments, and media effects from online social networks.