Intel and Udacity have announced an edge artificial intelligence (AI) for IoT developers nanodegree programme to train the developer community in deep learning and computer vision. The aim is to accelerate the development and deployment of AI models at the edge by leveraging the Intel distribution of the OpenVino toolkit.
 
Students who complete the programme, estimated to take about three months, will receive a graduation certificate from the Udacity California-based educational organisation.
 
“Historically, students have learned how to build and deploy deep learning models for the cloud,” said Jonathan Ballon, Intel vice president. “With Udacity, we are training AI developers to go where the data are 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.”
 
As industries such as manufacturing, retail, healthcare and others increasingly develop computer vision and AI at the edge for accurate and real-time insights, making sure the workforce has relevant skills to address the demands of these industries has become imperative. While the global edge computing market is forecast to reach $1.12tn by 2023, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 32.6%, the workforce is not equipped to address industry demands.
 
“This programme is part of Udacity’s commitment to provide training for one million developers worldwide,” said Gabe Dalporto, CEO of Udacity. “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.”
 
To address the growing skills gap, Intel collaborated with Udacity to create the programme. Students will have the opportunity to complete three real-world projects, each reviewed and approved by Udacity’s reviewer network. Students who successfully complete the programme will receive a certification from Udacity and have a practitioner-level skill set in delivering AI at the edge.
 
For those unable to commit to the full programme, the Intel edge AI fundamentals with OpenVino course includes a free subset of the content from the programme. This course does not include projects or technical mentor support, but offers in-depth knowledge on how to develop AI products for the edge.
 
In November, Intel and Udacity launched the Intel edge AI fundamentals course. The top 850 students who completed the 2.5-month fundamentals course have been awarded nanodegree scholarships. Twenty-five of the scholarship winners were from Women Who Code’s Portland, Oregon, chapter.
 
The nanodegree programme 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 toolkit allows graduates to increase 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 Intel hardware and software.