Huawei Uganda has announced a new free Artificial Intelligence (AI) study aimed at accelerating training and upskilling Uganda’s ICT professionals with the latest industry technologies.

The new Artificial Intelligence course is available at the Huawei Uganda ICT academy website (https://e.huawei.com/en/talent/#/news/details?consultationId=743) and classes shall begin today (Monday) for whoever is interested to study.

“The Artificial Intelligence (AI) course is an addition to the already existing Huawei professional certification path which includes on-demand ICT industry courses like Routing and Switching, Cloud computing, wireless, network security, Big Data, Data Communications, among others,” the company said in a press release.

To date, Huawei has trained approximately 4,000 Ugandan ICT Professionals and certified over 1,300 under its ICT Academies hosted by Makerere, Kyambogo, Nkozi, Gulu, Muni, and Mbarara, among other universities.

Initial ICT Academy training on courses under the Huawei professional certification path started in 2019 and continued in 2020 with new virtual training due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

“In 2021, the addition of AI under the Huawei Certified Network Associate (HCNA) path will upskill more ICT professionals with a detailed pool of course units necessary for deep learning.”

The HCNA-AI course uses a mainstream TensorFlow framework and supports Keras (a high-level neural network API, and deep learning framework written in Python) widely used, powerful, and has excellent compatibility necessary for fast learning.

Learning material from the course involves basic mathematics and machine learning which will guide students to gradually understand all related techniques of deep learning such as, convolutional neural networks, cyclic neural networks, regularization and optimizers.

At a later point in the course, deep learning in application areas such as, computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing will be introduced to contextualize all AI use cases in the world.

Additionally, the HCNA-AI course provides a convenient platform with an anytime learning mode which allows students to set a custom learning pace.

More so, a free simulation environment can be accessed on an Elastic Cloud Server (ECS) hosted on the Huawei Public Cloud, and then installed according to the course manual to help students emulate real-world AI use cases.

The installed environment has a custom public IP address, username and password allowing students to log in to the lab environment, and learn anytime from anywhere by simply having an active internet connection.

Also, the HCNA-AI program offers programming exercises that include an image recognition battle, a speech recognition contest, and human-machine dialogue so that students can easily emulate what they learn and implement them through real-world applications.

While unveiling the new HCNA-AI certification structure, Huawei Uganda’s Public Relations Director, Gao Jian noted that the AI engineering certification path offers fundamental knowledge and provides industry-specific applications that can be used in line with other technologies including 5G, Internet of Things (IOT), among others.

On why Huawei has introduced the HCNA-AI certification study in Uganda, Gao Jian said that, “It is to train and certify engineers who can use algorithms, such as machine learning and deep learning algorithms, to design and develop AI products and solutions and make improvement through innovation. Such engineers are competent for sales, marketing, product manager, project management, technical support, and other AI positions.”

So, similar to all Huawei ICT Academy certification paths, HCNA-AI students will be able to participate in the annual Huawei ICT competition and the Huawei ICT Job Fair from where they can showcase their talents against the world’s best in national, regional and global rounds.