eli, smart parental accompaniment

For the vast majority of the working class parents, early childhood parental experience is complicated, stressful and generates feelings of guilt as they do not have adequate interaction in time and quality with their little ones. Affecting the development of the little ones, their future life and our societies.

eli, provide a personalized and profesional accompaniment with information and guidance about development and bonding of parents and children, It uses the experience of Early Childhood Development experts and Artificial Intelligence to personalize the information, improves the parental experience and boosts the overall scalability and cost-effectiveness of early childhood interventions.

As a result, the bonding of parents and children is improved, raising awareness and teaching parents to show love, play, eat well, and establish limits and values, to build their children’s self esteem, brain, and character. 

For the vast majority of the working class parents, early childhood parental experience is complicated, stressful and generates feelings of guilt as they don’t have adequate interaction in time and quality with their little ones.

According to the national employment survey in Mexico (ENESS), only 4% of children aged 0 to 5 go to a day care center, which means that most mothers don’t have care information directly on hand. And According to the  National Center on Education and the Economy NCEE the most nations don’t guarantee quality in education and parental involvement.

The labor and health systems are non functional support networks for the working class parents, adding up to their live the complications of working hours, time commuting, schedules and the inability to pay for high price infant services.

On average, working class parents spend 2 hours a day with their children, the parents express they don’t know how to deal with parenting challenges. Due to this parents react using punitive parenting the majority of the time.

This vicious circle generates an ever increasing feeling of guilt in parents, and a significant negative effect on the development of the children, impacting their life and our society.

• Aimed at middle and lower middle class working parents, with children from 0 to 6 years, with little time, worried about the future of their children and with a clear need for help.
• Parents who pursue changes from punitive parenting practices to respectful upbringing but do not know how to do it. We also target those families who leave their children with family or mixed caregivers (family and daycare). 
• We are also serving socially responsible manufacturing and service companies, with men and women in parental situation that have a large number of workers in their production areas, administrative areas and offices. These organizations have expressed their wish to improve the parental situation of their employees through a labor benefit to create or strengthen their long-term labor relations and work loyalty. 

eli, is always available for caretakers even at unexpected times with real time answers. Personalized and High Quality Professional Advice. Based on the philosophy of respectful upbringing based in love. Available at their privacy of their home, no commuting, no line ups. Affordable Price for working class parents.

With the AI platform we profile the parents, caregivers, and children, to make a personalized development plan that includes Daily Tip and Activities. The daily tips are conformed by alimentation, information of stages of development, care and love, to inform and raising awareness. The Activities are arranged by categories of development such as cognitive, motor, language, and socio emotional. We encourage the parents to do the activities to develop or strengthen the bonding with their children.

The chat is the characteristic that parents love most, since they can ask parenting questions and get professional help

With the data from all the interactions with that family we can proactively determine if the children is behind or beyond of their stages of development, and link up with the specialists, also to find out what are the most important actions the parents should execute to have an adequate development. 

The data analytics will be used to continue our research, public policies and of course keep value to our customers.

• Our solution is based on emerging technologies as AI, Data Science, Big Data, Analytics. A difference of the products that exist today, with eli our pedagogue of AI, we are an interactive solution we attend the questions of upbringing in real time. To impact millions of children, we leverage on cutting-edge technologies like Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Big Data and Analytics. Data Analysis results will provide valuable information for research.
• We radically change the way we approach working parents, we take advantage of its ease of having a smartphone and to bring professional and personalized help in the privacy of their home without spending time on commuting, appointments, or waiting lines.
• Since we are oriented to working parents, we approach this service through the companies in which they work to be offered as a labor benefit. 
• To this day, with all the companies that have gone to offer our services as a labor benefit, they have given us feedback that never before had someone offered similar services for their employees. In addition to being innovative, they consider it to have a great impact on the lives of their employees.

eli uses a few Natural Language Understanding (NLU) techniques such as intention detection, slot extraction to produce a human-like multi-turn conversation that our users feel comfortable talking to. This allows us to collect more data to make eli much more accurate on every iteration. The data that is currently fed into the models is collected and curated manually from the users chat interactions on Whatsapp.

Additionally, eli provides a bespoken development plan delivered to the parents on a daily basis (although parents may customize the days they want to receive any information). To do so, we are starting to use Telegram, a chat platform similar to Whatsapp, that provides a rich API to send information without human intervention. To make this possible, eli leverages  multiple big data techniques to ingest and produce aggregated data from our users which can be later used to provide more accurate information. The tools we used for that analysis include Spark, Hadoop, Presto and MongoDB. Such technologies allow eli to scale out the creation and distribution of development plans on an almost infinite manner.

Finally, we utilize AWS as our main platform for data storage, processing and analytics. The services we use more often include RDS, EC2, Lambda, Cloudwatch, DynamoDB, Athena and S3. These technologies help us drill down behavioral patterns, as well as telemetry data (information on how they are using the service, churn, and even activity scoring) to improve our machine learning models and hence provide a much better user experience.

Our Impact hypothesis is that If we accompany the parents and caregivers then they will be aware of the importance of their work in this stage and if they follow the personalized advice and activities they will be able to build bonds of attachment with their children and in this way achieve an integral development to form the bases that will help them in their adult life.

Target Customer: Working class parents from middle and lower middle class, with children from 0 to 6 years, with little time, concerned about the future of their children and with a clear need for help. Parents that wishes to change their punitive parenting practices to a respectful approach but they do not know how to do it. Parents who leave their children with family or mixed caregivers (families and children's stays).

Depth of Impact: 

• To Improve the relationship between parents and children
• To increase the quantity and quality of interactions of parents with their children
• To increase the use of parenting based on love and respectful upbringing
• To Improve family dynamics to an atmosphere of love and respect
• To Improve the quality of the physical and emotional life of the children.
• To inform parents to improve their parenting role
• To standardize the care of the upbringing and development of parents and caregivers.
• Positive effects on the adult life of the child

BREADTH OF IMPACT: 6 millions of families

We are in the stage of collecting data, we have 30 subscribers, in order to understand more about our market, validating value proposition, business model, etc. We already have 1 B2B customer, we sell the companies a package of subscriptions for their employees as a benefit .

• At the end of this year we are going to be able of give the service to 1000 people with the AI prototype. 
• Next year 3,880
• 2 more years 31,590
• 3 more years 141,000 and look for other investment round 
• We target to achieve 6 Million subscribers in 6 more years.

Next year.

• By September 2019 To have an enhanced prototype, to test it for free. 
• By December  2019 reach 1,000 people to test for free the prototype. We are working in the digital marketing strategy to reach these quantity of people
• By December  2019 Obtain 100 families as a monthly subscription for collecting data. At this time parts that have not been automated, so human creativity and intelligence must come in to play. These customers get the best of the service, because is done with professionals that answer instead of a chatbot, in order of collecting more data, and information for the data analysis. 
• By December  2019 Obtain seed capital

• In August 2020 Launch our mobile application. 

Next five years. 

• Almost reach 6millions of families we want to reach with the market of Mexico, Latin America en USA.
• Have sophisticated real-time data collection and visualization tools.

• Our technical barriers pertain to data availability and data collection because we have not found open-source information as of yet.
• Our cultural barrier is that some parents may be afraid of the AI technology. 
• Our financial barrier is to get the seed capital to continue working in our project.

• Technical barriers - We are currently providing our services as part of our strategy to build our database. We will not wait until the technical part (code and software) is ready because the data that we are accruing will be used to teach our NLP technology (Natural Language processing).
• Cultural barrier - We will educate our customers regarding the positive influence of AI as it pertains to education. We will demonstrate the benefits that AI has exerted in many others projects around the world.  
• Financial barrier - We are currently realizing revenue from our services that is partially funding our operations. The balance of funding needed is being supported by the founding members.

.

We are 15 people working on the project.
1 founder and CEO 100% of the time 
5 founders 50% of the time 
9 part-time professional volunteers such as Psychopedagogues, Psychologists and marketing 

1 Accounting firm

We all have a dream 

Democratize information and best practices of early child development to all parents, caregivers and society in general.

We know this is a hard work to do, but must be done and we have the passion to make it true.

We are a team of professionals in the areas of Psychopedagogy, Psychology, Data Science, Cyber Security and Business.
Within the team we have parents and caregivers users of the platform.
We are passionate about early childhood to generate social change and technology to use it as a catalyst.
We are agents of change that we give our lives every day for this dream.

Current Allies
Pacto por la primera infancia  / Citizen advocacy and collective impact initiative whose objective is to make early childhood a priority and positively impact the indicators on the exercise of their rights at the national level in Mexico. 
Universidad Antropológica de Guadalajara / We obtain talent as psychologists for professionals practices.

Data Lab, AIforGood /AI professionalization centers and data science / To continue developing our AI-based solution
SDG 2030 / To implement 3 of objectives 3,4 and 16

eli is an artificial intelligence chatbot app that improves parental experience, advising and solving parenting questions for working class parents.

Value preposition:

• eli, is always available for caretakers even at unexpected times, when it is most convenient for them.
• Available at their privacy of their home
• Personalized and High Quality Professional Advice
• Based on the philosophy of respectful upbringing based in love
• Real time answers
• Service without leaving the home, no commuting, no line ups
• If needed, connection with doctors and specialists
• Afordable Price

Aimed at working-class parents middle and middle-class lower, with children aged 0 to 6.

The benefits for our beneficiaries are: Cognitive, physical and emotional development 

• Develop their self-steem to prepare them for the future
• Develop their cognitive level to prepare them for primary school

Our channels are digital marketing and word of mouth recommendation for B2C (business to customer), and manufacturing and services companies for B2B (business to business) model. 

Our 2 commercial strategies

Through manufacturing and services companies for B2B (business to business) model, with men and women in parental situation having a large number of working class parents in their areas of production, administrative areas. Companies that are sensitive to parental needs and that they want to improve the parental situation through a job benefit, creating or strengthen their long-term employment and loyalty relationships. The company is charged through a monthly subscription package in advance.

Through recommendations and digital marketing for B2C (business to customer) model, monthly service is charged through a monthly subscription per infant. Payment via T/C/D or convenience store. 

Awareness talks and workshops about the importance of early childhood development

In the long term, we want to develop our training solution for children's stays and caregivers.

Additional we are looking for seed investment, donations and awards.

We are quite sure that the mentoring, business connections and connections of entrepreneurs, can help us see different points of view from ways not explored before. We know that MIT has a great recognition in the topics of AI technology and that we can have a not only technological approach but of social impact is of great value for us.

Today we have made validations, data collection and even sales. But the next step is to enter a complex level of validation of the user experience with the improved chatbot technology we are working on. It is a step that we know we should be surrounded by the best mentors in order to make technology the tool that leads us to scale our solution to make more happy families.

And of course the investment is a great value to be able to achieve our objectives in the short and medium term.

.

Heckmanequation
Unicef
MIT
BID
UC SanDiego
Early childhood research centersaround the world 

With eli, smart parental accompaniment, seeks to be a catalyst project for gender equality. We are convinced that education is a valuable tool that must be addressed to both men and women to ensure that it is affective in society and is transgenerational through family education.

Since our solution is based on machine learning, our investment of the prize would focus on hiring professionals on the issue of gender equality that supports us to train and supervise that our algorithm of artificial intelligence does not have bias in gender roles.

Within the team of founders we have Lorena Lawrence, who lives in Houston TX, she is user of eli, in the data collection phase through whatsApp and who is responsible for developing the business in the USA. She is currently studying her EMBA (Executive MBA) and is starting to do the necessary research and tests in the market to make a value proposition properly directed to the American market and replicate our experiences in the Mexican market.

This year 2019 we were invited to a panel where Facebook, Google, Microsoft and NTT Data, and helKi  in Guadalajara, Jalisco Mexico, organized by Inter-American Development Bank. 

We talked as helKi through its company principles governs its decisions in each of the facets of the organization, personnel hiring, process development, decision making, business models, cybersecurity and the development of the machine learning algorithm.

One of our strengths is that the founding partner Eduardo Salcedo, an expert in cyber security, with experience in the American market and who is responsible for information security from the different visions of visualization, access, advocacy, etc.

If elected, we would use the award to access more sophisticated tools that help us spread the policies and principles to each of our work colleagues over time and implement in American market.