Amazon backs Waterloo student program to advance operational AI

Thursday, March 2, 2017

Engineering students at the University of Waterloo will apply classroom lessons in artificial intelligence (AI) to help develop new uses for a voice-activated virtual assistant system in a program funded by Amazon.

Waterloo is one of just four North American universities initially selected to participate in the Alexa Fund Fellowship, which comes with funding for instruction and supervision of student design projects in the burgeoning field of AI and the Internet of Things (IoT).

“It’s evolving at incredible speed,” said Fakhri Karray, director of the Centre for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Waterloo. “These are very exciting times for researchers, product developers and customers.”

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