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Alps Alpine Co., Ltd. (Tokyo: 6770; President & CEO: Toshihiro Kuriyama) reached an agreement in December 2019 with Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) regarding the implementation of an advanced artificial intelligence and data science course. The course, exclusively for Alps Alpine employees, will begin in April 2020.

Alps Alpine is seeking to bolster system and software development capabilities to facilitate a business model shift toward fusion of systems and software with hardware. This is to keep pace with a major transformation occurring in the automotive industry characterized by the “CASE” trends (connected cars, autonomous driving, sharing and services, and electric vehicles) and the spread of the Internet of Things across society with the deployment of the fifth-generation mobile communications system, or 5G. Artificial intelligence (AI) and big data will be indispensable for ongoing business expansion in Alps Alpine’s chosen domain and the company urgently needs to nurture engineers with the relevant knowledge and skills.

Tokyo Tech started trialing a course for its new graduate program, the Progressive Graduate Minor in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, in December 2019. The aim of the program, officially on offer from April 2020, is to give graduate students already possessing expertise in a particular field the opportunity to augment those skills with a sound grounding in AI and data science, thereby developing human resources who can then apply that knowledge within their own fields through cutting-edge research and societal implementation.

Recognizing that Tokyo Tech’s highly specialized course would have immense benefit for its engineers and their development, Alps Alpine signed an agreement with the university regarding implementation of an advanced artificial intelligence and data science course just for Alps Alpine employees. Under the agreement, Tokyo Tech’s graduate program will be realigned with the specific needs of Alps Alpine as a customized specialty program. Ten employees, mainly junior engineers, will be invited to sit the course over a four-month period starting in April as part of their training. Participants will receive basic literacy in big data processing, AI programming and deep learning, as well as practical, applied instruction with a focus on addressing social challenges.

Ready to harness both internal and external resources in pursuit of IT expertise, Alps Alpine will seek to expand its workforce of AI engineers and data scientists through ongoing implementation of the program in fiscal 2020 and beyond and deployment of the knowledge that participants bring back to the company.