South Korea’s Seoul National University (SNU) Graduate School of Data Science has partnered with Google on fostering artificial intelligence ecosystem through the global tech giant’s Coral AI platform.

The two parties plan to ink a cooperation agreement this month, which will allow the Korean academic institute to obtain Google’s upgrade roadmap for Coral AI. SNU will be the first university to get such information from Google, according to Cha Sang-kyun, SNU data science school dean.

Google’s Coral is a platform for building products with local AI, and was first introduced in the market in March last year. It is embedded with a tensor processing unit, a custom application-specific integrated circuit that Google developed specifically for neural network machine learning. It is designed to help building AI-based software and products using local AI, instead of having data processed through central data servers like a cloud center.

SNU currently is in talks with the Korean science ministry and other authorities to open an AI education center using Google’s Coral initiative.

The university aims to provide the most up-to-date training on AI development based on Coral update roadmap to be shared from Google upon signing a cooperation agreement.

SNU has succeeded in incorporating Coral into its data science program after a team of its graduate school students built an AI-based program. There were no computer engineers in the student team but they were able to design a software program that can identify a person wearing a mask among a group of people in a picture using Coral.

The school plans to provide AI classes for small and medium-sized firms and help expanding business opportunities, said Cha.

By Hong Sung-yong and Cho Jeehyun

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