Wilberforce University faculty member, Dr. Deok Hee Nam, will soon give his students a high level opportunity.
Dr. Nam, who has taught computer science and computer engineering at the university since 2003, has recently been awarded a $15,000 unrestricted grant from Google. This endowment will give students a greater access to course offerings in artificial intelligence and machine learning. A hot topic in the computer science field, machine learning allows artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically learn without human programming.
“I always want to have an opportunity to be involved with this kind of AI tools. Also, through this, I will be able to introduce AI or machine learning fields to Wilberforce University. All this can benefit our students in their professions as well as their future academic achievements.” – Dr. Deok H. Nam, Wilberforce University faculty member and grant awardee –
Wilberforce’s dean of the college of professional studies says, the actual impact of this award will exceed the dollar amount because it will create a great momentum for learning. “This enables people to share the experiences of their knowledge. Its unrestricted status gives Dr. Nam the ability to diversify how he wants to use its application.” – Dr. Anuradha Venkateswaran, Wilberforce University
Though grounded in professional development, this grant award is student focused. It will give Dr. Nam the opportunity to introduce his students to more artificial intelligence, sometimes called machine intelligence, that mimics the human mind.
“I will take this training from Google and develop courses for Wilberforce. Our university curriculum can get more variety than the current courses. Hence, students can have more options to select their major studies based on their interests.”
Through this grant, students will be connected to the Google data center and will be equipped with new, front edge technology like TensorFlow, a specialized machine learning platform which is used in professional fields. This opportunity can even be expanded for use by recent Wilberforce computer science graduates who will be offered the course, gratis.
“This is, however, a technical course with prerequisites and would require students to be able to program in Python, entering the course. Based on the training, the students can extend their skills to other popular fields like data science, which can be applied almost everywhere these days.”
Currently, Google is one of the corporations partnering courses related to machine learning through Coursera, an online education platform that offers coursework from universities in more than 48 countries. Dr. Nam says he will enroll in the Coursera program to learn and then apply its concept to students.
He expresses his appreciation to Wilberforce University president, Dr. Elfred Anthony Pinkard, vice president of academic affairs, Dr. Edward Hill and college of professional studies dean, Dr. Anuradha Venkateswaran for their full support of his academic disciplines.
