Amsterdam, October 19, 2018 – Lord Knight of Weymouth, ex Schools Minister for the UK, and currently representing the biggest teacher community in the UK and worldwide at Tes Global Ltd, was the special guest of Wizenoze, a specialist Ai company, that is celebrating its 5th year.
Amsterdam, October 19, 2018 – Lord Knight of Weymouth, ex Schools Minister for the UK, and currently representing the biggest teacher community in the UK and worldwide at Tes Global Ltd, was the special guest of Wizenoze, a specialist Ai company, that is celebrating its 5th year.
“Access to the internet is still an issue. But, if most people are unable to fully comprehend what is written online, then readability is an even bigger issue. With Wizenoze’s readability technology an internet that can be of educational benefit to all is now available.”
Lord Jim Knight
- Lord Knight gave a passionate speech regarding the social need to improve how the internet is used in education, if it is to realise its potential to be a tool for all students, regardless of ability or background.
- The Web for Classrooms was built for education, and not for commerce, unlike other popular search engines. It was developed in response to research that found over 60% of people cannot understand the majority of what is written online. This figure is highly likely to be an underestimation.
- Wizenoze uses AI to create a simple 5 -scale ‘reading index’ that curates online content by reading level. Currently, they have a collection of almost 7 million pages.
- 5 years on from its inception, Wizenoze provides bespoke APIs for customers to take advantage of this new technology. With the Web for Classrooms acting as the go-to search engine on managed school platforms to enriching digital textbooks and to support the whitelisting of websites for internet safety companies.
Wizenoze has been recognised as a venture with the potential to change the world we live in by offering students worldwide easy access to reliable and readable online content through the Web for Classrooms. An active supporter of the global literacy movement. Wizenoze was selected by the world’s leading education company, Pearson, to participate in Project Literacy Lab, the world’s first international partnership focused on supporting rapid growth ventures that are positioned to close the global literacy gap by 2030. The Web for Classrooms has been recognised as an innovative use of Ai that has the ability to quickly scale, worldwide.
“We see that the education sector is increasingly switching to the digitisation of teaching content, with students becoming more dependent on public online information. With The Web for Classrooms, we offer access to an internet that has been developed for an educational environment. Students gain valuable learning time because they are confronted with relevant information, which is readable and comprehensible.”
Diane Janknegt, Founder, Wizenoze
For interview requests or for further information, please contact Diane Janknegt at diane@wizenoze.com.
Editor’s notes
Wizenoze is on a mission to help students all over the world at schools, in libraries and at home to find relevant content online. Wizenoze specialises in the readability and modern classification of written texts. The company was founded in 2013 by Diane Janknegt (ex-Director, Microsoft) and Prof. Dr Theo Huibers (Strategy Advisor & Professor, Twente University).
Founded in Amsterdam and with a global office in London, the company is passionate about its mission to close the readability gap on the web, especially for students and second language learners. Working with teachers and supporting schools lies at the heart of that mission. Today, the Web for Classrooms is being deployed in varied learning environments to provide easy access to relevant web-based information at the right reading level.
Importantly, our in-house software development team have become leaders in the field of developing machine learning software for readability classification. Our new, 1 to 5 classification system was developed after 4 years of academic research lead by our PhD specialists in natural language processing.
Wizenoze is proud that the Dutch Government gave them an Innovation Credit and also has been awarded a prestigious development grant by Google in recognition of our advanced technology. In addition, our UK expansion is actively supported by the UK Government’s Global Entrepreneur Programme at the Department for International Trade, which encourages successful European companies to open up UK offices. More broadly, our latest investments have also been focused on worldwide expansion and our technology is now being deployed in India, Tajikistan, Kenya, the USA and the UAE.
