Today marked another major milestone for the Grand Duchy’s digital future as Prime Minister Xavier Bettel signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with AI computing leader NVIDIA.
The agreement was announced at the government’s annual ICT meeting in the presence of the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Economy Etienne Schneider, Minister of Finance Pierre Gramegna, Minister of Education Claude Meisch and President of ICTluxembourg Gérard Hoffmann.
Proposed and facilitated by Digital Luxembourg, a government initiative charged with unifying and strengthening the nation’s digitalization efforts, the MoU was inspired by previous public-private partnerships, for example with Cisco.
Pioneers of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), which catapulted the PC gaming market nearly two decades ago, NVIDIA offers cutting-edge GPU deep-learning technology and extensive training capabilities.
The cooperation centers on skills development – a priority within the Grand Duchy’s digital agenda – and will help the country’s students, scientists, engineers, startup employees and industry professionals tackle society’s pressing issues.
“We know that technology alone is not sufficient for sustained development. We want a population that can support the most advanced next-gen tech and use it as a tool for innovation. That is why this cooperation focuses so heavily on skills training. Who better to learn from than the leaders of these technologies?”
A conference held by Digital Luxembourg in spring this year on AI and GPUs first illuminated the level of interest among the country’s researchers and innovators.
“Before developing the MoU, we spoke with researchers, developers and other actors to gauge their needs and priorities, ” explained Anne-Catherine Ries, Coordinator, Digital Luxembourg. “As an enabler, we will continue bringing together relevant stakeholders to develop projects that have the highest impact on our ecosystem, of which AI technologies are a crucial part.”
NVIDIA’s powerful GPU technology, used by both Facebook and IBM, is propelling machine learning forward and, consequently, the potential of AI along with it, impacting a wide spectrum of activities – from genome research to automated driving to financial services.
The University of Luxembourg’s Interdisciplinary Center for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) and Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biology (LCSB) look forward to harnessing NVIDIA’s knowledge and technology to advance their respective work in automated driving, and biomedical and healthcare research.
"AI and high-performance computing are at the core of the ongoing transformation in life sciences and medicine. We are very excited about the cooperation with NVIDIA as this will make Luxembourg an even more attractive place for biomedical and healthcare research and entrepreneurship, " said Professor Rudi Balling, Director of the LCSB. “ NVIDIA is the world leader for AI computing technology, that’s why we work with their platform in our experimental self-driving vehicle”, noted Prof. Björn Ottersten, Director of SnT, ” This new cooperation will allow us to stay ahead of the curve scientifically and build a strong AI ecosystem in Luxembourg”.
