Machine Learning Producer Launches Academic Program

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 11/13/18

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.

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