IONIS Education Group officially announced yesterday the creation of its research and excellence center in generative AI dedicated to pedagogy, initiated last year. Its goal is to develop a more personalized, inclusive, and effective education for the benefit of students and teachers, while ensuring an ethical, open, and responsible approach.
Founded in 1980 by Marc Sellam, IONIS Education Group is the leading private higher education group in France. With 27 schools and entities spread across France and internationally, it trains more than 35,000 students each year in key sectors: engineering, finance, business, marketing, creation, communication, management, IT, digital, aeronautics, energy, transportation, and biotechnology.
Since its inception, the IONIS Group has made pedagogical innovation and experimentation priorities. These 45 years of project-based pedagogy, particularly in the fields of engineering and tech with engineering schools EPITA, ESME, IPSA and SupBiotech, as well as in IT at Epitech, have allowed it to build a unique database. This will be utilized by the center to accelerate, through GenAI, the transformation of teaching methods and models. The solutions developed will initially be experimented within its schools before being launched on the market.
Leading Partners
The IONIS research center is designed as a space for interdisciplinary exploration and collaboration. It will soon bring together around thirty researchers, doctoral students, and research engineers within three departments: "Deeptech", "Edutech", and "Infrastructure and Valorization". The goal is to develop scalable solutions while ensuring ethical and responsible reflection on the use of AI in education.
It already benefits from solid support from academic partners such as Sorbonne University, the Institute of Research in Computer Science of Toulouse (IRIT), and the CNRS. Researchers will have access to Microsoft’s Cloud and AI infrastructure via Azure AI Foundry to optimize their models while complying with GDPR requirements.
Concrete Applications to Transform Education
Since last January, some schools in the Group have already been testing initial solutions from this research center.
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Two services dedicated to evaluation and automatic feedback generation for students have been deployed at EPITA;
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Four interactive services have also been deployed at Epitech: an interactive analysis tool for code repositories, an automatic generator of multiple-choice questions, as well as two conversational agents, one for revision assistance and the other for exercise resolution and skill acquisition.
Fabrice Bardèche, Executive Vice President of IONIS Education Group, comments:
"Generative AI represents an extraordinary opportunity to transform education. By combining the strengths of our schools, our pedagogical data heritage, and our scientific expertise, we are convinced that this research and excellence center will become a key player in the development of AI applied to education, with the support of our current and future partners."