Huawei Provides $1m To Power AI Research At UC Berkeley

Huawei will provide $1 million to the University of California, Berkeley as part of a partnership to work on basic artificial intelligence (AI) research.

The partnership stems out of Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Laboratory, the company’s research unit that is dedicated to the development of machine learning, AI and data mining.

Huawei’s AI researchers will join forces with those from UC Berkeley’s newly formed Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, where they will work on AI related subjects such as natural language processing, reinforcement learning and computer vision.

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The aim of the partnership is to advance AI research and find uses for the technology out in hands of people, rather than keep it to the confines of a laboratory and as theoretical models.

As such, Huawei and UC Berkeley do not appear to be pushing the boundaries of AI in terms of creating the most intelligent machine, but rather ones that will have a means to contribute to society and daily life.

“The two parties believe that this strategic partnership will fuel the advancement of AI technology and create completely new experiences for people, thus contributing greatly to society at large,” said Huawei.

In practical terms, the advancements made at the Berkeley lab could see Huawei add AI-powered features into its smartphones and tablets in a similar fashion to how Microsoft uses its Cortana virtual assistant.

Or Huawei could pursue the likes of Google with its AI assistant and create an service that learns what a users preferences are and helps provide more tailored answers or provide predictive prompts to the use rather than waiting to be commanded into action like a more basic virtual assistant found within smartphone software in today’s markets.

With Google heralding its AI tech as the era of ‘always on’ computing and AI being touted as a core part of driving digital transformation, such industry and academia partnerships are likely to become more popular.

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