The chip-making giant Intel has joined hands with Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Friday signed a memorandum of understanding to digitally empower close to 1 lakh students with Artificial Intelligence (AI) curriculum integrated into India’s education system.
The initiative entails the rolling out of a curriculum with the AI curriculum framework for class 8th, 9th, and 10thfor 22000 schools with the goal of empowering1 lakh students within 2020. The curriculum is based on “Intel’s AI for Youth” which is an immersive, hands-on learning programme using experiential methodologies covering both social and technologicalskills.
The “Intel AI for Youth” aims at empowering the young generation to become potent in the field of AI which is all the buzz today.
Shweta Khurana, Director-Programmes, Partnerships and Policy Group at Intel India said, “AI has become a strategic imperative for worldwide economic growth and will continue to be one of the most crucial technologies of the future.Our collaboration with CBSE is a meaningful step towards enabling our youth to become digitally-empowered and effectively utilise emerging technologies such as AI to solve pressing local and global challenges”.
The MoU also states the Intel along with CBSE will soon be launching a “National AI Olympiad” to motivate the young minds to participate, engage and develop an interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Intel predicts AI and all its application contributing USD 12.7 trillion dollars by 2030 towards the global economy.
Biswajit Saha, Director, Skill Education and Training, CBSE said: “Our collaboration with Intel has helped us empower the youth with AI skills in an inclusive way and we hope to take this journey ahead in a big way in the coming years.”
The curriculum was pilot tested in eight schools training youth to create AI projects focused on social impact in 2019, with the aim to empower 1,00,000 students with AI-readiness skills in 2020.
The collaboration will also enable AI-readiness across North and North-Eastern states with a special focus on ‘Aspirational Districts’. This will be achieved by creating AI Skills Labs as dedicated spaces for students to learn basic AI-skills by engaging in experiential hands-on learning sessions. Intel has collaborated with Kendriya Vidyalaya Sanghathan to set up India’s first AI Skills Lab at Dr Rajendra Prasad Kendriya Vidyalaya, New Delhi in accordance with the AI curriculum specified by CBSE. The school will be using the lab for all students studying in grade VIII and those who adopt AI as a skill subject in grade IX and above. The lab has been designed to support the journey of a learner towards becoming AI-ready as they go from AI learning to AI model training and inferencing.