UpGrad bets on AI for job creations, after Cambridge now partners with IIIT-B

Few weeks after announcing a partnership with Cambridge Judge Business School, and earmarking Rs 200 crore for foraying into Southeast Asian Markets and the Middle East, UpGrad, the online higher education platform, has now announced a partnership with IIIT-Bangalore to launch PG Diploma programme in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The 11-month Post Graduate Diploma programme in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is a rigorous and selective PG Diploma Programme which will enable learners in mastering concepts in Machine Learning and AI like classification algorithms, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), reinforcement learning and graph models amongst others.

Speaking exclusively to YourStory, Ronnie Screwvala, Co-founder, UpGrad says:

“Colleges and Universities have in-depth knowledge of technical domains and the latest research happening in these domains. IIIT Bangalore brings a strong understanding of evolving areas like machine learning and AI. Hence such a collaboration will help us bring to the learners, the most recent developments in the field.”

The curriculum is developed by the IIIT-B faculty and leading industry professionals in Indian technology sector. Students will get a hands-on experience through cutting-edge projects created by industry leaders. Furthermore, they will also learn large-scale software deployment of machine learning models.

The team adds that those who learn how to make machines that exhibit intelligence today, are going to lead the next technological revolution tomorrow. Through this programme, the aim will be to instill the latest machine learning and AI skills which are in demand in the industry.

The team at UpGrad believes that India is uniquely positioned to lead the AI revolution, with its existing massive base of skilled manpower that has years of IT domain knowledge. UpGrad believes that it needs to provide learning options to professionals to build on their existing skills and help them contribute to the AI ecosystem.

Mayank Kumar, Co-founder, UpGrad adds:

“Machine learning and AI are rapidly evolving areas and our research shows that the existing yearly demand for 50,000 professionals is going to go up to 1,00,000 in the next two years. Through this collaboration, where IIIT-B will share its expertise in the area and industry professionals will bring latest use cases, we should be able to prepare expert professionals geared towards the next technology wave of AI.”

With India churning out 7.5 million graduates every year with practically no employable skills, a vast majority of them struggle to reskill themselves. Today regardless of skill, robotics is being used in all processes and AI is making applications intelligent without having people to manage them.

Every company from Google to Facebook to Oracle to Microsoft to SAP are working on projects and platforms where software can learn and make decisions without having a large number of people managing business.

Analysts predict that by 2020, AI technologies will be virtually pervasive in almost every new software product and service. Gartner predicts that by 2020, AI will be a top five investment priority for more than 30 percent of CIOs.

Therefore, the UpGrad and IIIT-B partnership intends to reskill professionals to deal and be able to work with AI technology. In a year, UpGrad aims to reskill 10,000 people. Prof Sadagopan, Director, IIIT-B says,

“Together, we have already up-skilled over 2,000 professionals in the first year of the Data Science programme. Given that the demand of super specialists in the area of machine learning is rising and UpGrad has deep connects with the industry, along with mature technology, to offer deeply technical programmes such as machine learning and AI — we expect this programme to also be a game changer. This programme will equip our learners to disrupt almost any industry through their newly acquired skill sets."

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