Technology
About 150 to 200 students from the new Data Science and Artificial Intelligence undergraduate programme are expected to benefit from this, says the university.
NTU’s dean for the College of Engineering Professor Louis Phee (second from left) and AMD’s corporate vice president for Asia Datacenter Group Allen Lee (second from right) at the lab’s launch event. (Photo: AMD)
SINGAPORE: Global chipmaker AMD and Singapore varsity Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on Friday (Dec 14) jointly announced the launch of a S$4.8 million laboratory aimed at nurturing future data science and artificial intelligence (AI) talent here.
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In their press release, both parties said the data science and AI lab will tap on AMD’s deep learning technologies as well as NTU’s strengths in machine learning, AI and data science.
Benefiting from these will be the first batch of undergraduates for NTU’s Data Science and Artificial Intelligence programme that will run from academic year 2019.
These students will be exposed to real-world applications such as developing software used in security fields like identification and motion detection. They will also work on projects such as developing clinical support solutions using big data analysis to aid medical diagnosis , it added.
Students will work on AMD’s open-source Radeon Open Compute platform that will allow them to simulate complex systems or scenarios in days, rather than years, it said.
The university will invest S$1.9 million in the lab, while AMD will put in another S$2.9 million, NTU told Channel NewsAsia separately on Friday. About 150 to 200 students from the new programme will stand to benefit from the facility, a spokesperson added.
The varsity will provide the lab space, cover operational costs and provide domain experts from its teaching staff, while AMD will provide the technology along with training and development support from its machine learning, AI and high-performance computing (HPC) experts.
The investment will help AMD develop local talent and “seed” AI and data science skills to future leaders and researchers at a very early stage.
“This would give them time to be familiar with the technology as well as equipping them with the knowledge that there are alternative deep learning platforms available that can run TensorFlow or Caffe applications,” a AMD spokesperson said.
TensorFlow and Caffe are deep learning or machine learning frameworks popularly used today.
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The partnership will be for five years and is timed to allow undergrads taking the data science and AI programme to enjoy the full benefits of this industry collaboration, the spokesperson added.
“NTU is the premier institution for artificial intelligence, and we’re very excited to bring our technologies to empower the participating students to freely explore the diversity of deep-learning applications,” said Mr Allen Lee, corporate vice president for Asia Datacenter Group at AMD, in the press release.
