Huawei plans to invest $140 mn in AI talent education

Shanghai  :  Aiming to work with partners to build an affordable, effective, reliable and inclusive Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem, Chinese tech giant Huawei on Friday released its "AI Developer Enablement Programme" under which it plans to invest $140 million in AI talent education.

The programme will help Huawei collaborate with developers, partners, universities and research institutions to build a better development ecosystem that can support AI resources, platforms, courses and joint solutions.

"Huawei's AI Developer Enablement Programme offers a platform for technical communication, talent training, and innovation to developers, tutors, and Huawei partners," Zheng Yelai, Vice President of Huawei and President of Huawei Cloud BU, said on the last day of Huawei Connect 2018, a global event for the ICT industry.

For developers, the programme covers 20-hour free introductory training, three-week beginner AI training camp, AI developer contests, innovation incubation camp for top talent to help transform R&D success into commercial applications.

The company will support its partners by building joint solutions based on Huawei's AI computing platform and development platform to promote AI application in multiple industries, Zheng said.

"It will also help in setting up an AI promotion alliance to build a joint innovation lab, providing 1,000 sets of free development environments, including development modules and boards," he said.

The company said it would provide its first 20 partners with expert resources, support joint solutions and extra support for AI product launches and technical implementation.

Huawei said it was planning to invest over $140 million under its talent development plan.

For the purpose, the company would be cooperating with universities and scientific research institutes to develop AI courses, publish text books and support scientific research and talent training.

It would also help universities and research institutes build AI colleges and institutes and assist in building AI labs.

The company would help in supporting the participation of universities into Huawei cloud open community and building a platform for communications between universities, research institutes and Huawei AI experts.

At present, Huawei has started developing AI talent at eight universities in China, including Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences of Tsinghua University, the University of Science and Technology of China, Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Nanjing University, Southeast University, Xidian University, and the Institute of Acoustics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Huawei's university partners and business partners including Visystem, Gosuncn, iLumintel, WINNER Technology, Riseye, Malong Technologies, SenseTime, Seemmo, Yitu Tech, YISA, Exocr Technologies, Cloud Walk, and Intellifusion were present at Huawei Connect here to witness the launch of Huawei's AI Developer Enablement Programme.