NIT signed a memorandum of understanding

National Institute of Technology (NIT), Warangal, and Computer Society of India (CSI) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on Saturday at ZettaMine Labs in Hyderabad to launch a certificate programme in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for working professionals.

The programme, which comprises of over 350 hours of classroom and lab sessions, mentoring sessions, workshops and hackathons, will commence from June 9 in Hyderabad for an initial batch of 60.Prof. Ramana Rao, Director of NIT-Warangal, said that the Electronics & ICT Academy of NIT had partnered with SIG Big Data Analytics of CSI to launch a certificate programme in AIML.

“This is the first step in leveraging academic and industry resources to skill people in the fields of Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics, IoT, Data Mining, Security and Privacy. As the Director of NIT-Warangal, I am looking forward to setting up various centres of excellence and R&D labs along with training in emerging technologies including AI and ML in the near future,” he added.Chandra Dasaka, Secretary of CSI’s SIGBDA, said, “This is a practitioner-oriented, real-world driven and weekend only immersive programme. We built an industry-relevant curriculum with the inputs from industry experts and academia.”

Surya Putchala, CEO of ZettaMine Labs, said that as execution partner for the programme, they had segmented targeted working professionals into upskilling, cross-skilling and reskilling and identified relevant career transformation partners.“Computing power, connectivity, sensors and algorithms are the four big things that have contributed to AI’s current emergence. Even though AI takes away many existing jobs, it also creates more jobs than the jobs it replaces. Gartner recently predicted that 2.3 million people are needed to work on AI applications by 2022. India suffers in the quality of university education and building ecosystems of multi-disciplinary stakeholders. This AIML programme by NIT-W and CSI-SIGBDA will address both the challenges,” said BVR Mohan Reddy, Cyient chairman.

Karuna Gopal, president of Foundation for Future Cities, said, “Healthcare, agriculture and human capital are the three areas that AI can make big impact in India. By kicking off this programme, you are bridging the gaps in leveraging India’s largest natural resources in human capital.”

Prof DVLN  Somayajulu, Chair of E&ICT Academy, NIT-Warangal was also present.