Facebook Collaborates with Udacity to Propose Secure and Private AI Scholarship Challenge

Online learning platform Udacity in association with Facebook has launched the 'Secure and Private Artificial Intelligence Scholarship Challenge' in order to advance deep learning and AI skills in students.

The involvement of the social media platform will enable 5,000 interested individuals from across the globe to enrol for the scholarship program. They can enrol for the supported version of the scholarship program.

After the execution of the first phase, the top 300 students will then be eligible to receive full scholarships for either of the nanodegree program – Deep Learning Nanodegree program or the Computer Vision Nanodegree program from Udacity. The course is open for applications currently and the enrolments are likely to begin from May 30, 2019.

At the Facebook Developer Conference in San Jose, the company announced its goal regarding the program. The scholarship aims at equipping students with the required skill set to perform in the cutting-edge privacy sustaining technologies including Federated Learning, Differential Privacy, and Encrypted Computation. Students will also get to learn about advanced techniques of extending PyTorch with deep learning tools. These tools will be needed to securely train smarter artificial intelligence model on distributed model data to offer proper data privacy solutions to consumers.

Ishan Gupta, MD India at Udacity said, "We are delighted to introduce the brand-new Secure and Private AI course. Through this program, we aim to nurture capable data scientists and AI experts. The data-driven world of today is indeed in dire need of skilled professionals to protect data from being exploited or misused. We are excited to partner with Facebook for helping us extend the scholarship challenge to deserving candidates across the globe."

The tech-driven academic program will enrich the student learning process further by connecting them with peer-supported AI practitioner's community across the world and also enable to participate in webinars. Through these kinds of sessions, students will be able to interact with each other and collaborate while getting constructive feedback on their project.

The course was architected in alliance with Andrew Trask who is the Leader of OpenMined and Research Scientist at DeepMind. Trask asserted, "The most urgent barrier to the world becoming privacy preserving is the lack of talented data scientists who know how to use privacy-preserving tools. Without data scientists who know how to properly preserve privacy, private data is either left unused (which hurts the accuracy of our models – a critical loss in fields such as healthcare) or is put at risk through data science techniques which lack the proper privacy protections."

The collaboration of these two online platforms will surely create a pool of opportunities for budding tech-professionals. This makes a promising venture into the AI Industry to nurture the technology experts and make a significant contribution to transforming world of the century.