Amazon India  announced the launch of an integrated learning programme for students to learn applied Machine Learning (ML) skills, making them industry ready for careers in the new technology. The programme - ML Summer School - has been introduced to help train students in ML and address the growing demand for talent with this skill set across various industries, Amazon India said in a statement.

The curriculum will cover the fundamental concepts in ML, while linking them to practical industry applications through an immersive three-day course, it added.

Participants of the ML Summer School will be identified through an online assessment. It is open to engineering students in their pre-final/final year of Bachelors, Masters or PhD studies across select tech campuses in 2021, including Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Delhi, International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad, Birla Institute of Technology (BITS), National Institute of Technology (NIT) Tiruchirappalli and Anna University among others.

Students will get to learn first-hand on how advanced ML techniques such as Deep Learning and Probabilistic Graphical Models can be leveraged to solve specific business problems in the e-commerce domain such as demand forecasting, catalogue quality, product recommendations, search ranking and online advertising, the e-commerce major noted.

They will also have access to the Amazon Research Days (ARD) conference, where they can learn about technology trends in industry through presentations from renowned ML leaders around the world.

Amazon India said a batch of students from select tech campuses in India will be given the opportunity to engage through virtual classroom tutorials, followed by interactive Q&A sessions with scientists at Amazon.

For students with prior exposure to certain areas of ML, the programme can act as a refresher course, while additionally providing a practical perspective on ML applications in industry.

"With the pace of advancements in ML, we are proactively helping students to learn about the latest trends in the field of ML and apply them to solve real-world problems," Rajeev Rastogi, VP - India Machine Learning at Amazon, said. He added that the company has collaborated with universities to provide hands-on learning experiences to students who are passionate to learn more about ML applications in industry.

"Our aim is to prepare students for science roles - this will help to reduce the gap between the growing demand for ML roles across companies and the talent pool with applied ML skills," Mr Rastogi said.

In a blog, Amazon India noted that its machine learning team is driving innovations that "have a profound impact not only on shoppers in India, but also on customers around the world".

"Models developed by Amazon's scientists in India have been used globally to improve the quality of Amazon's catalog by extracting missing attribute values from titles and images, and backfilling them; and ensuring that for all products, images match with the title," the blog said.

ML algorithms for improving address quality in India are being leveraged in other marketplaces to identify poor quality addresses and categorise addresses as Residential or Commercial, it added. I

n addition, including delivery speed as a feature in search ranking — a key factor that helps surface 'faster' offers to customers in search results — was first launched in Amazon India, it said.