Udacity, Facebook announce AI scholarship for students

Lifelong learning platform Udacity, in collaboration with Facebook, has announced a "Secure and Private Artificial Intelligence (AI)" scholarship for tech enthusiasts globally.

Facebook's investment would make 5,000 seats available for a supported version of the course.

After the completion of the first phase, top 300 students would receive full scholarships -- either for the Deep Learning Nanodegree programme or the Computer Vision Nanodegree programme from Udacity, the Silicon Valley-based company said in a statement on Thursday.

The course is open for application and general enrollments would begin on May 30.

"We are excited to partner with Facebook for helping us extend the scholarship challenge to deserving candidates across the globe," said Ishan Gupta, Managing Director, Udacity, India.

The scholarship is aimed to equip students with privacy-preserving technologies such as "Federated Learning", "Differential Privacy", and "Encrypted Computation". The students will be able to interact and collaborate with each other while receiving constructive feedback on their project, the company said. The course would also train scholars in using deep learning tools needed to securely train smarter AI models on distributed private data to provide robust data privacy solutions to users.