University of East Anglia to teach machine learning skills

Students from the UEA will be taught machine learning programming using a new Google-owned software

University students are to be taught machine learning skills as part of a collaboration with Google.

University of East Anglia (UEA) students will work with Google's TensorFlow team from September.

They will learn essential skills using web-based Machine Learning (ML).

ML, a type of artificial intelligence, involved machines learning and improving from experience without needing to be specifically coded to do so.

The UEA said students will learn cutting-edge skills to "enable them to stand out from the crowd"

TensorFlow.js is Google's open-source library for machine learning in JavaScript.

Traditionally, ML has been almost solely the realm of those who use the programming language Python, and has been largely inaccessible to web engineers who use JavaScript, the UEA said.

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Prof Gerard Parr, head of UEA's School of Computing Sciences, said the collaboration would help students gain "cutting edge skills that can enable them to stand out from the crowd".

The university will now integrate the machine learning syllabus and accompanying materials into a number of computing science course modules, including those dedicated to datamining, machine learning and artificial intelligence.