Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence, future technology of Sri Lanka
The Sri Lanka Association of Software and Service Companies (SLASSCOM) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have collaborated to help position Sri Lanka as a hub for data science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) skills, start-up and learning programme, said Jeevan Gnanam, Chairman of the SLASSCOM at a media briefing held at the Shangri-la Hotel in Colombo on Wednesday.
He said the programme aims to instill skills to 50,000 students across Sri Lanka by 2022 with AWS educate global programme and practical cloud technology experience. A programme has been initiated to train 50,000 engineering and non- engineering students in Sri Lanka on Cloud Computing and AI skills over the next two years.
Mr. Gnanam said they are helping the state and private sector universities to go ahead with the project free of charge. In Sri Lanka they are focusing on developing Cloud computing technology to train the workforce on data skills. Asked whether drone technology will be developed to airlift products here, he said they may consider it later.
Rahul Sharma, President, Public Sector/Amazon Internet Services (Pvt) Ltd said that new technologies such as cloud skills and machine learning require a lot of experiential learning. One cannot have theoretical learning alone and then engage in new jobs that are coming up in the market in future. “We have created an account for students so that they could do projects, internship on platforms that we provide to enhance their learning capacity and experience. They can keep their skills updated with new learning pathways, etc. The whole idea is to make this project a learning experience.”
There are over 24,000 programmes used worldwide where over 100,000 students have enrolled in such programmes.
“Here in Sri Lanka we are looking forward to enroll 50,000 students by 2022 in this programme and are working very closely with SLASSCOM,” he said.
The new programme to be launched at institutions will be provided with Cloud Computing and machine learning laboratories for the use of students. Mr. Sharma referring to Amazon said that they have been doing machine learning for the past 20 years where drone technology have been developed to airlift medicine and blood samples to any remote part of the country not accessible easily within a short time period.