Technology company Intel partners with educational organization Udacity in training developers through the new Intel Edge AI for IoT Developers Nanodegree Program.

The nanodegree program, which is estimated to last for about three months, delves into deep learning and computer vision, which “will accelerate the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) models at the edge by leveraging the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit.”

With this certificate course, the two companies hope to address the growing skills gap. The program will train students to work on three real-world projects, which would be “reviewed and approved” by Udacity’s reviewer network. At the end of the program, students not only obtain certification but will also be recognized with a practitioner-level skill set in delivering AI at the edge.

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“Historically, students have learned how to build and deploy deep learning models for the cloud,” said Jonathan Ballon, VP and GM, Internet of Things Group, Intel. “With Udacity, we are training AI developers to go where the data is generated in the physical world: the edge. Optimizing 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.”

AI use cases

Artificial intelligence’s (AI) use cases are expanding with industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and retail, among others, increasingly developing computer vision and AI at the edge solutions for accurate and real-time insights.

Intel said the global edge computing market is forecast to reach $1.12 trillion by 2023, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 32.6%, the workforce is not equipped to address industry demands.

“This program is part of Udacity’s commitment to providing training for 1 million developers worldwide,” said Gabe Dalporto, CEO of Udacity. “Our collaboration with Intel will open the doors for students to learn the deployment of cutting-edge AI technologies at the edge and aid those with limited access to educational resources to grow in their fields.”

For those unable to commit to the full nanodegree program, the Intel Edge AI Fundamentals with OpenVINO course includes a free subset of the content from the program. This course does not include projects or technical mentor support, but it offers in-depth knowledge on how to develop AI solutions for the edge.

Intel OpenVINO toolkit

The nanodegree program 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 OpenVINO toolkit allows graduates to maximize 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 DevCloud for the Edge to develop, test and run their workloads on a cluster of the latest Intel hardware and software.

Students can sign up for the course via Udacity.