Huawei signs AI research partnership with UC Berkeley with $1 million grant

Artificial Intelligence is ruling the roost in the tech industry presently. In the latest on that front, Chinese tech company Huawei has partnered up with UC Berkeley with a focus on AI research and the company will be providing the University with $1 million grant for the same.

The partnership between Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Laboratory and Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR), is being billed as a “strategic partnership into basic research”, catering domains like deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision.

“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,” Huawei notes.

With AI having become the core of next gen devices and services, a partnership directly with the university bodes well for Huawei.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft- all have either partnership with universities or offer research grants in the AI domain.In 2014, Google formed a partnership with Oxford University, contributing funding to AI research there, and acquired two of the startups that had been incubated at Oxford as part of that effort.

Amazon, on the other hand, runs college competitions to eke out best practices and ideas in AI. Getting hold of new ventures or startups in the field is also quite popular these days.

Huawei has a robust 75,000 employees team working in the R&D. The company also invests over $8 billion annually into research and development.

Noticeably, BAIR lab already has multiple partnerships with the likes of Facebook, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, Adobe, Amazon, Yahoo Japan, Nvidia, Intel etc. and has almost 2 dozen faculty and 100 grad students that are working on topics that are of interest to these corporations.