Intel, TI bolster education initiatives in emerging regions

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- 11/1/2007

Expanding their reaches far beyond Silicon Valley, two of the semiconductor industry's heaviest hitters, Intel Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) each announced this week ambitious plans to aid tech education in developing countries.

In the African country of Nigeria Wednesday, Intel's chairman Craig Barrett announced a comprehensive set of digital inclusion projects aimed at improving education, healthcare and economic development for Nigeria's 140 million people.

Barrett launched a pilot telemedicine project supported by the Federal Ministry of Health that is aimed at bringing pediatric care to a rural hospital serving a region of 4.5 million people. Barrett also announced that Intel has signed agreements with the Federal Ministry of Education to broaden several successful education initiatives, including training 150,000 teachers and donating 3,000 computers to schools.

Financial details of the initiatives have not been disclosed by Intel.

According to Intel, the company's support enables doctors in the west-central Nigerian town of Bida to consult in real time with pediatric and surgical specialists in Nigeria's capital city of Abuja through the new telemedicine system, which features video conferencing and high-speed broadband connections through WiMAX. The system connects one of Nigeria's flagship medical institutions, the National Hospital in Abuja, with the Federal Medical Centre in Bida, a rural 200-bed medical facility that's a four-hour drive, or over 155 miles, away.

Meanwhile, Intel said it also plans to train 150,000 teachers over the next five years through the Intel Teach Program. The program has already trained more than 8,000 educators in Nigeria since October 2006.

Also on Wednesday, TI announced the expansion of its commitment to technology innovation in China, by inviting three universities in China -- Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and University of Electronic Science and Technology -- to join its worldwide leadership university program. These three universities will join four other TI leadership universities as part of a network that works on future TI signal processing funded programs.

The three universities will receive funding of $1.6 million (12 million Chinese yuan) over five years. The funding will be used to support research programs, as well as curriculum development in DSP, analog and mixed signal systems.

The company's education-centered activities in the country are nothing new: TI started its China University Program in 1996 and has assisted these three leadership universities in establishing technology centers and more than 160 labs in about 141 other China universities.

Intel and TI are in good company; other tech industry leaders have recently upped their investments in university programs.  In October, IBM Corp. and Google Inc. jointly announced plans to start an initiative to promote new software development methods at universities. As part of the program, the two companies will provide hardware, software and services to add to universities' curricula and research. The University of Washington was the first to join the initiative; also piloting the program are Carnegie-Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland.

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