Tuskegee University Gets $100K From Microsoft Artificial Intelligence Initiative

• The award to Tuskegee University is part of the Microsoft Artificial Intelligence Initiative.
• The AI research could have impacts on web experience personalization, gaming, and system autonomy.
• Microsoft is the latest tech giant to invest in HBCU research initiatives. Earlier this month, Amazon announced a collaboration with Howard University.

Tuskegee University is getting a $100,000 boost to AI machine learning research thanks to tech giant Microsoft.

Microsoft this week announced the $100,000 award to Tuskegee University, a historically Black college and university (HBCU) in Alabama.

The money from the Microsoft Artificial Intelligence Initiative will allow Tuskegee researchers to develop real-time resource management tools using reinforcement learning for AI.

University faculty Mohammad Rahman and Fan Wu will use the money for their project, "Dynamic Cloud Resource Management for Cloud-Based Cyber-Physical Systems (CBCPS) with Reinforcement Learning (RL)." Researchers are working to use reinforcement learning to teach a machine to develop real-time management to maximize performance.

According to Microsoft, this research will enhance gaming experiences, create more personalized web experiences, and help train autonomous systems to work safer and more reliably.

"The proposed AI-related work will have the potential to significantly impact future research in maximizing performance for real-time resource management with the given cloud resources, making it faster, more accurate, and more efficient," Wu said.

Microsoft is the latest tech giant to invest in HBCU research initiatives. Earlier this month, Amazon announced a collaboration with Howard University supporting research into machine learning and natural-language processing.