JOHOR BAHRU, 16 June 2015 – Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) and NVIDIA Corporation USA have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop human capital in Graphic Processing Unit (GPU), computing for high speed machine learning, and big data analytics.
UTM is the first Malaysian University to be selected by NVIDIA Corporation USA to become its academic-industry collaboration partner. With this strategic collaboration between NVIDIA, UTM will become the hub for GPU-based technology solutions for high performance computing such as in big data analytics, visualization, molecular computing, data science and others.
The Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Development), Prof. Dr. Azlan Abdul Rahman and also Vice President of Solutions Architecture NVIDIA Corporation, Marc Hamilton at Dewan Sultan Iskandar (DSI), at UTM Johor Bahru campus.
Speaking at a press conference after the ceremony, Prof. Azlan said that this cooperation will make an impactful move by offering professional certificates in data science and big data analytics.
NVIDIA Corporation has gone beyond research on computer graphics, to also include other fields such as machine learning, computer vision, image processing, scientific computation as well as big data analytics. Big data analytics has become a challenging phenomenon in multidisciplinary areas such as social and political sciences, education, medical, and finance, due to a huge unstructured data tsunami that needs detailed analysis to elucidate and produce high quality results.
Considering the fact that Science and Technology-based development is expected to contribute more than one-third of the economic growth target, greater emphasis should be placed on optimizing the application of new and improved technology.
Thus, this MoU can act as the catalyst for enhanced and sustained R & D based on first-class research activities, resulting in excellent and impactful outputs. It would not only contribute towards the growth and development of ICT technology, but would also nurture home-grown experts and researchers.
UTM fully supports the country’s agenda to ensure qualified data scientists and big data analytics experts are developed and nurtured through the establishment of a Big Data Centre. The centre will become “a hub for big data analytics and high performance machine learning algorithms”, and will offer professional certificates in data science and big data analytics in the near future.
