Facebook Partners Udacity to Provide AI Scholarships for 5,000 Interested Developers

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Facebook Partners Udacity to Provide AI Scholarships for 5,000 Interested Developers

Facebook has joined the train of tech companies actively supporting artificial intelligence education and development. The social media company has partnered edtech platform, Udacity to provide AI scholarship to students from anywhere around the world.

Called Secure and Private AI Schoalrship, Facebook aims to train about 5000 individuals on different AI skills.

Facebook announced the new scholarship scheme recently during its F8 conference. According to the company, the goal is to equip students with skills for providing privacy. Techniques like Federated Learning, Differential Privacy, and Encrypted Computation are top on the list.
Using private data, students will be able to develop solutions to help shore up data privacy for users.

“We are delighted to introduce the brand-new Secure and Private AI course,” says Ishan Gupta, MD India at Udacity. “Through this program, we aim to nurture capable data scientists and AI experts. The data-driven world of today is indeed in dire need of skilled professionals to protect data from being exploited or misused.”

Facebook Partners Udacity to grant AI Scholarships for 5,000 Interested Developers

“The most urgent barrier to the world becoming privacy preserving is the lack of talented data scientists who know how to use privacy preserving tools”, says Andrew Task, who developed the course for the scholarship.

“Without data scientists who know how to properly preserve privacy, private data is either left unused or is put at risk through data science techniques which lack the proper privacy protections,” concludes. 

With this move, Facebook now joins a growing list of companies actively looking for a way to co-opt AI. IBM for instance has a research facility in Kenya based on its AI product, IBM Watson. Google, the search engine giant, launched an AI centre in Accra, Ghana this year. Meanwhile Microsoft recently opened an office in Lagos solely for AI and mixed reality development.

However, unlike the others who have viable AI products for sale, Facebook’s delve into open AI research and scholarship is chiefly to solve one problem. Through the AI scholarship scheme, Facebook aims to aggregate ideas on how to address its huge privacy problem.

The scholarship could provide Facebook with a pool of fresh solutions.


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