Machine Learning Producer Launches Academic Program

A company that produces commercial and open source software for big data analysis has also launched a university program. Participants in the H2O.ai Academic Program will receive free use of specific tools for educational purposes, support in building machine learning courses and access to an academic Slack community, the company's online training tools and courses, and guest lectures delivered by its data science experts.

Institutional partners will receive free non-commercial use of licenses for H2O Driverless AI for their students and professors. This platform, which H2O refers to as a "data scientist in a box," automates many of the tasks involved in setting up machine learning models, including model selection, hyperparameter optimization, model stacking and model deployment.

H2O resources are already in use at several universities, including the University of California Los Angeles, where it's used in 400-level "tools in data science" course, and George Washington University, where it's used in a data mining course that's part of a master program in business analytics.

"Using H2O.ai in our AI curriculum gives students a better understanding of machine learning techniques in a shorter period of time," said Michael Bliemel, dean and professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Ontario in Canada, in a statement. "Having the ability to easily visualize and explain data inputs as well as explainable model outputs truly opens up machine learning to non-technical students in business degrees, which is essential to changing how we educate our university students so that they can be productive innovators and citizens after they graduate."

Interested instructors and students may sign up for the program on the H2O academic program page.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • From Fire TV to Signage Stick: University of Utah's Digital Signage Evolution

    Jake Sorensen, who oversees sponsorship and advertising and Student Media in Auxiliary Business Development at the University of Utah, has navigated the digital signage landscape for nearly 15 years. He was managing hundreds of devices on campus that were incompatible with digital signage requirements and needed a solution that was reliable and lowered labor costs. The Amazon Signage Stick, specifically engineered for digital signage applications, gave him the stability and design functionality the University of Utah needed, along with the assurance of long-term support.

  • Microsoft

    Microsoft Introduces Its First Quantum Computing Chip

    Microsoft has unveiled Majorana 1, its first quantum computing chip, aimed at deployment in datacenters.

  • interconnected glowing nodes and circuits in blue and green, forming a neural network on a dark background with a futuristic design

    Tech Giants Launch $100 Billion AI Infrastructure Network Project

    OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle have unveiled a new venture, Stargate, through which they aim to build a massive AI infrastructure network across the United States. The initiative, which was announced at the White House with President Donald Trump, has been described as the "largest AI infrastructure project in history."

  • glowing digital shield with a checkmark in the center, surrounded by interconnected lines and nodes on a dark blue background with subtle circuit patterns

    Navigating CMMC 2.0: New Cybersecurity Standards Impact Higher Education

    In October 2024, the Department of Defense published a new update to its Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification enforcing new cybersecurity standards on universities and colleges. With Phase 1 beginning this year, here's what the new requirements mean for higher ed.