Intel, in collaboration with Udacity, has announced the launch of a new edge artificial intelligence program in order to train one million developers.
The new program — Intel Edge AI for IoT Developers Nanodegree Program — has been designed to train the developer community in deep learning and computer vision, with the aim of accelerating the development and deployment of artificial intelligence-based models at the edge by leveraging the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit.
According to the company blog, the students who complete the aforementioned nano degree program, which is estimated to take about three months, will receive a Udacity graduation certificate.
When asked about the initiative, Jonathan Ballon, the vice president of Intel and the general manager, Internet of Things Group said, “Historically, students have learned how to build and deploy deep learning models for the cloud. With Udacity, we are training AI developers to go where the data is generated in the physical world: the edge. Optimising direct deployment of models on edge devices requires knowledge of unique constraints like power, network bandwidth and latency, varying compute architectures and more. The skills this course delivers will allow developers – and companies that hire them – to implement learnings on real-world applications across a variety of fields.”
Industries like manufacturing, retail, healthcare and others, across the globe, are developing computer vision and artificial intelligence edge solutions in order to obtain accurate and real-time insights, making sure the workforce has relevant skills to address the demands of these industries has become imperative.
Also, It has been estimated that the global edge computing market is going to reach $1.12 trillion by 2023, expanding at a CAGR of 32.6%; however, the workforce is not equipped to address industry demands.
According to Gabe Dalporto, the CEO of Udacity, this program is part of Udacity’s commitment to providing training for one million developers worldwide.
He said, “Our collaboration with Intel will open the doors for students to learn deployment of cutting-edge AI technologies at the edge and aid those with limited access to educational resources to grow in their fields.”
Intel collaborated with Udacity in order to address the growing skills gap with the Intel Edge AI for IoT Developers Nanodegree Program, where students will have the opportunity to complete three real-world projects, each reviewed and approved by Udacity’s reviewer network.
This will, in return, provide the students with a practitioner-level skill set in delivering AI at the edge.
Alongside, for those students who will be unable to commit to the full nano degree program, the Intel Edge AI Fundamentals with OpenVINO course will provide a free subset of the content from the program. This course does not include projects or technical mentor support, but it offers in-depth knowledge on how to develop AI solutions for the edge.
Apart from this initiative, last year, November, Intel and Udacity had also launched the Intel Edge AI Fundamentals Course, where the top 850 students who completed the two and half month fundamentals course were awarded nano degree scholarships. Twenty-five of the scholarship winners were from Women Who Code’s Portland, Oregon, chapter.
This nano degree program will introduce students to the Intel OpenVINO toolkit, which allows developers to deploy pre-trained deep learning models through a high-level C++ or Python inference engine API integrated with application logic. Based on convolutional neural networks, the OpenVINO toolkit provides graduates with the opportunity to maximise application performance across a range of heterogeneous Intel architectures to deliver fast, efficient deep learning workloads. Anyone working for a company can also take advantage of Intel’s IoT DevCloud to develop, test and run their workloads on a cluster of the latest Intel hardware and software.
To avail the benefits of the nano degree program, students have to sign up for the course on the Udacity website.
