Finland offers crash course in artificial intelligence to EU

Finland is offering a techy Christmas gift to all European Union citizens – a free-of-charge online course in artificial intelligence in their own language, officials said on Tuesday.

The tech-savvy Nordic nation, led by the 34-year-old Prime Minister Sanna Marin, is marking the end of its rotating presidency of the EU at the end of the year with a highly ambitious goal.

Practical understanding

Instead of handing out the usual ties and scarves to EU officials and journalists, the Finnish government has opted to give practical understanding of AI to one per cent of EU citizens, or about five million people, through a basic online course by the end of 2021.

It is teaming up with the University of Helsinki, Finland’s largest and oldest academic institution, and the Finland-based tech consultancy Reaktor.

Teemu Roos, a University of Helsinki associate professor in the department of computer science, described the nearly $2 million project as “a civics course in AI” to help EU citizens cope with society’s ever-increasing digitalisation and the possibilities AI offers in the jobs market.

The course covers elementary AI concepts in a practical way and doesn’t go into deeper concepts like coding, he said.

“We have enormous potential in Europe but what we lack is investments into AI,” Roos said, adding that the continent faces fierce AI competition from digital giants like China and the United States.

The initiative is paid for by the Finnish ministry for economic affairs and employment, and officials said the course is meant for all EU citizens whatever their age, education or profession.

Since its launch in Finland in 2018 “The Elements of AI” has been phenomenally successful — the most popular course ever offered by the University of Helsinki, which traces its roots back to 1640 — with more than 220,000 students from over 110 countries having taken it so far online, Roos said.

A quarter of those enrolled so far are aged 45 and over, and some 40 per cent are women. The share of women is nearly 60 per cent among Finnish participants - a remarkable figure in the male-dominated technology domain.

Consisting of several modules, the online course is meant to be completed in about six weeks full time - or up to six months on a lighter schedule - and is currently available in Finnish, English, Swedish and Estonian.