JOHOR BAHRU, 24 August 2016 – The Polytechnic Institute of Guarda from Portugal (IPG) and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) today inked a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) and Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate in developing Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) accelerated computing for high speed machine learning technology and big data analytics.
Through this partnership, UTM aims to develop human capital and a pool of next generation high quality big data science talent in line with Malaysia’s vision in Driving ICT in the Knowledge Economy as one of the strategic thrusts for the Eleventh Malaysia Plan.
UTM Deputy Vice Chancellor (Development), Prof. Dr. Azlan Abdul Rahman and Prof. Constantino Mendes Rai, President of IPG signed the MoA and MoU on behalf of their respective universities, witnessed by Prof. Dr. Siti Mariyam Shamsuddin and Prof. Noel Lopes of IPG.
The collaboration provides a framework for both parties to work collectively on Big Data Science research and translate the research into tools and methodologies to enable the industry and academia in Malaysia.
The signing ceremony was held here at Hotel Jen Puteri Harbour, commemorating the 2nd International Workshop on Big Data Analytics (IWBDA 2016) organized by the UTM Big Data Centre which saw a strong turnout of 150 academia and Information Technology (IT) professionals from Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Canada, India, Egypt, Germany and Morocco.
UTM has embarked on the country’s agenda to ensure qualified data scientists and big data analytics are borne through the Big Data Centre.
With 3 successful course enrolments of Professional Certificates in Data Science since its launching in 2014, UTM through its Big Data Centre is committed to serve as ‘a university hub for big data analytics and high performance human computing based algorithms and a grooming avenue for more data scientists to support the talent requirement in Malaysia’.
UTM Big Data Centre is also known as a GPU Research Centre in Malaysia awarded by the NVIDIA Corporation, USA in 2015 based on the impact of the research leveraging GPU computing.
This recognition has inspired the UTM Big Data Centre and IPG to embark with GPU-Based projects mainly on Machine Learning algorithms with CUDA.
The agreements signed will witness both parties working together on developing GPU-Based Machine Learning Tools involving sophisticated algorithms dealing with Human-based Computing and Perception, Deep Learning and Multi Strategy Learning Adaptations which will address the needs in making sense of huge amount of complex data and to meet the rise of analytics-centric computing which intensifies demand for highly qualified big data scientists and data science enthusiasts.
Such partnership will help to accelerate human capital development in Big Data Science as the new catalyst to propel the nation forward in order to strengthen infrastructure to support economic expansion and harness technology to improve Malaysians lives.