Inside the AI partnership formation of Alabama’s Miles College and NVIDIA Corporation
About a year ago, Miles College President Bobbie Knight began conversations with a global company that would do something “amazing” for students, faculty and the community in Alabama, she said.
Those talks weren’t with just any company. Knight met with NVIDIA Corporation, the world leader in artificial intelligence in computing, which this month became the first publicly traded company to top $5 trillion in market value.
Last week, Miles and the AI Chip Maker, announced a collaboration to integrate AI across academic programs, faculty research and community engagement on the Historically Black College and University’s Fairfield campus, The Birmingham Times reported.
Miles College President Bobbie Knight. (contributed)
“I wanted this partnership because the future is here, it’s not here in 10 years, it’s here right now, and AI is part of the future,” said Knight during a recent panel discussion in Birmingham. “I wanted to make sure that our students, not just at Miles but students in the city of Birmingham and Fairfield, HBCUs, and the state of Alabama, are positioned to live in a world that is dominated by AI.”
Miles College is already implementing AI campus-wide, with nearly half of the faculty regularly integrating AI into course design and student learning modules, and about 60% of the college’s research is supported by AI.
Louis Stewart, the head of Strategic Initiatives for NVIDIA’s Global Developer Ecosystem, agreed with Knight that the partnership “is a ‘right now opportunity,’ it’s not a 5-10-year opportunity,” he said. “If all of you are not involved in AI right now, that’s a problem,” he told a room full of students gathered at the discussion. “If you don’t think about how AI can change the situation for your family, that’s a problem. If you’re not bringing your parents along, your brothers and sisters along, that’s a problem.”
A true partnership, Stewart said, is not “how can NVIDIA invest in you … but how can NVIDIA come walk alongside you as a piece of the puzzle; and you are willing to bring the other pieces to the table … Without the rest of the puzzle, you [just] have a piece. That doesn’t do you any good.”
Knight said she and Stewart spoke at a conference in San Jose with 40,000 in attendance earlier this year and another in Washington D.C. with 10,000 present last week. “That’s an audience that will have an opportunity to see what Miles College is doing with NVIDIA and hopefully create other opportunities for others,” she said.
The collaboration is bigger than Miles, said the school’s president.
“We’ve talked about taking this out to K-12… young people need to start now understanding AI and the implications of it in your daily lives, not just your life but in the lives of your parents and your grandparents, because I think it has the potential to be life-changing for so many.”
