IIT-Madras Faculty’s Startup Launches e-Portal ‘PadhAI’ for Affordable AI Courses for All
One Fourth Labs, a startup by faculty of Computer Science department of India’s premier institute, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-Madras), has launched an online portal called ‘PadhAI’ to train students and professionals on Artificial Intelligence (AI) which offers affordable India-specific courses on AI, starting from Rs 1,180 only for students across the country.
PadhAI, which will also have courses on AI’s offshoot ‘Deep Learning’, will offer 4-month course starting from February 1 2019. The course comprises 80 hours of lecture content and requires equivalent time in solving assignments.
The registrations for the course are open until January 24, 2019. Interested candidates can apply at padhai.onefourthlabs.in
Each year top performing students from courses on PadhAI will be invited to a summer garage – an AI residency program – at the IIT Madras Research Park. Invitees will have the choice to work on research, or problems of societal impact, or solutions with commercial value.
The course at PadhAI is open to all students, faculty, and professionals with a basic background in mathematics and Python. The fee for students and faculty is Rs 1180 and for working professionals, Rs 5,900.
The startup is also providing scholarships to professionals who are unable to pay the fees and for women returning from a break the startup is providing a full fee waiver.
The focus of the courses at PadhAI is primarily on combining theoretical knowledge with hands-on experience with emphasis on going from limited pre-requisites to solving a challenging problem in the Indian context that remains unsolved.
Pratyush Kumar and Mitesh Khapre (L-R)
Image – IndianExpress.com
Founded by Mitesh M Khapra and Pratyush Kumar, who’re assistant professors in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras, One Fourth Labs has been incubated by the IIT Madras Incubation Cell and is aiming to create AI-driven apps by collaborating with Small and Medium Enterprises (SMSEs) and the industry and generate value for the Indian economy.
“we hope to build a community around PadhAI by continuing to engage with you after the course through the DL garage, subsequent courses, and also through our startup One Fourth Labs which will build solutions on Deep Learning,” said the PadhAI website.
Notably, PadhAI will not be providing any compute resources and encourage condidates to explore cloud solutions such as the free tiers of AWS and GCP, which according to the startup will be sufficient for the first three months of the course.
The startup will also start courses on Natural Language Processing and Reinforcement learning, which are expected to start on Jan 2020 and will be of 4-months duration.
Via – Indian Express
Source: IndianWeb2
