Facebook today announced a partnership with Georgia Tech to make Artificial Intelligence (AI) education more accessible and increase pathways into AI for diverse candidates. The demand for AI talent has increased 30x since 2015 but current AI curriculums are often outdated - sometimes by decades - and don’t address practical applications. 

As part of this pilot program, Facebook is co-teaching and funding a deep learning course at GA Tech this semester. The course will close the gap between what’s being taught in graduate-level computer science courses and the deep learning techniques that are applied today by scientists and researchers. Facebook intends to scale this program to thousands of underrepresented students by building a consortium with 5-6 other universities, including minority serving institutions.

“The Facebook lectures provide students with real-world examples and techniques that are needed to deploy and scale algorithms. This is something that students always ask me for, and being able to provide them this information from a large, well-known company that uses these algorithms to process billions of pieces of data per day is invaluable to our students’ education and growth,” said Zsolt Kira, associate director of the Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech.

Georgia Tech is the country’s second largest producer of underrepresented people in PhD and Masters CS programs, making it the perfect partner for Facebook as the company plans to then scale this program and roll it out to five to six additional minority-serving institutions that reach diverse populations. 

Progress comes faster when experts with different perspectives are involved from the start, which is why partnerships with universities and institutions like Georgia Tech are an important step toward making this a reality. This program is part of Facebook’s long-standing effort to drive diversity and inclusion within the field, as it continues to support programs like the Align Master’s in Computer Science, teaches at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), and makes investments in organizations such as Black in AI, LatinX in AI, and Women in ML. 

Through partnerships and investments like this, Facebook remains committed to breaking down barriers of entry into AI, so that it can provide scalable AI educational content to drive a bigger and broader impact within our communities.