The Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) has received a $5 million grant from Google.org, the philanthropic wing of internet giant Google, to help post-secondary educators integrate artificial intelligence (AI) materials into their courses.
Amii will use the funding to establish a national consortium of 25 post-secondary institutions across Canada that will develop “easy-to-use AI curriculum materials” meant help faculty integrate concepts into existing courses and reach 125,000 students across the country.
This initiative is about “putting the skills to use AI tools into the hands of the future builders, and I think that starts with students.”
Sabrina Geremia
Google Canada
The yet-to-be-recruited consortium will determine the substance of the curriculum, as Amii is trying to not be “overly prescriptive,” Amii CEO Cam Linke told BetaKit in an interview. Linke figures it will include a base understanding of AI which, to him, means understanding how AI works, principles and practices for deploying AI, and the changing nature of the industry.
The focus of the curriculum will be broad, mostly targeting undergraduate-equivalent) programs, and not exclusively for computer science (CS) students, Linke said. He explained that CS programs already have more AI and machine learning education than most, and that it’s the other areas that need a boost.
“Companies are looking for that [AI] literacy in an incoming workforce that isn’t necessarily in the education they’re getting in college and university,” Linke said. “The ability to get that into more non-CS areas is something that we think is super important.”
Google and Amii hope that driving AI education will translate into increasing AI adoption in Canada, which they note lags behind global peers despite the country’s leadership in its research. In an interview with BetaKit, Google Canada vice president and managing director Sabrina Geremia pointed to a recent Deloitte report that found only 26 percent of Canadian organizations have adopted AI compared to 34 percent globally.
“We were such leaders in the primary research [of AI], the builders of the tools, but we need to get there on the adoption,” Geremia said. This initiative is about “putting the skills to use AI tools into the hands of the future builders, and I think that starts with students.”
Amii is a non-profit institute focused on the fields of AI and machine learning—which together make up machine intelligence. Created in 2002 as a joint effort between the Government of Alberta and the University of Alberta, Amii supports machine intelligence research and helps translate scientific advancements to industry.
Google supported another Amii initiative last year, providing the institute with $1.1 million in grant funding to support its Autonomous Drinking Water project. That initiative enabled the deployment of modular water treatment systems into underserved Canadian regions through reinforcement learning.
Feature image courtesy Google via LinkedIn.