Brainchip’s University AI Accelerator Program provides hardware, training, and guidance to students at higher education institutions with existing AI engineering programmes. Brainchip’s products can be leveraged by students to support projects in any number of novel use cases or to demonstrate AI enablement. Students participating in the programme will have access to real-world, event-based technologies offering performance and efficiency to advance their learning through graduation and beyond.

The Program successfully completed a pilot session at Carnegie Mellon University this past spring semester and will be officially launching with Arizona State University in September. There are five universities and institutes of technology expected to participate in the programme during its inaugural academic year. Each programme session will include a demonstration and education of a working environment for Brainchip’s AKD1000 on a Linux-based system, combining lecture-based teaching methods with hands-on experiential exploration.

“We have incorporated experimentation with Brainchip’s Akida development boards in our new graduate-level course, “Neuromorphic Computer Architecture and Processor Design” at Carnegie Mellon University during the Spring 2022 semester,” said John Paul Shen, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon. “Our students had a great experience in using the Akida development environment and analysing results from the Akida hardware. We look forward to running and expanding this programme in 2023.”

Brainchip’s first-to-market neuromorphic processor, Akida, mimics the human brain to analyse only essential sensor inputs at the point of acquisition, processing data with unparalleled efficiency, precision, and economy of energy. Keeping AI/ML local to the chip, independent of the cloud, also dramatically reduces latency.

“Universities are looking for the best way to differentiate their curriculum with real-world and hands-on leading-edge technologies,” said Sean Hehir, Brainchip’s CEO. “By partnering with Brainchip’s AI Accelerator Program, universities are able to ensure that students have the tools and resources needed to encourage development of cutting-edge technologies that will continue to usher in an era of essential AI solutions.”