AWS offers $10 million scholarship to help underrepresented students learn AI & ML skills

Cloud computing services provider AWS has announced an Artificail Intelligence and Machine Learning scholarship worth $10 million to aid underserved students globally for careers in the field. 

The program will utilise AWS DeepRacer Student League to teach students the foundations in machine learning concepts in the area of autonomous car racing, which will be used as an example for teaching machine learning fundamentals.  

DeepRacer is a partnership between AWS and Intel, which helps high school and college-enrolled students learn ML modules. 

AWS will also provide access to a no-cost version of the SageMaker studio lab. Sagemaker is the company’s platform to help developers and companies train, build and deploy machine learning models.   

“The two initiatives we are announcing today are designed to open up educational opportunities in machine learning to make it more widely accessible to anyone who is interested in the technology,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning at AWS.   

“If we are going to unlock the full potential of this technology to tackle some of the world’s most challenging problems, we need the best minds entering the field from all backgrounds and walks of life,” added Sivasubramanian, speaking at an ‘AWS re:invent conference’.   

An October 2020 report by the World Economic Forum estimates that technological advances and automation will create 97 million new technology related jobs by 2025.    

AWS said that the opportunities are growing, but diversity lags in science and technology careers.   

The program will specifically provide for 2,000 qualifying students from underrepresented and underserved communities with a scholarship for the AI Programming with Python Udacity Nanodegree program, which is expected to provide them with programming tools and techniques in machine learning. 500 students will then again be filtered out and will be provided an extra second scholarship, along with mentorship from Intel and AWS to further prepare them for a career in AI and ML.