NAAMII’s Academic-Social Outreach division has two major goals:
- Playing a pivotal role in modernizing informatics, mathematics and AI higher education in Nepal, collaborating with Scientific Division of NAAMII and existing universities to generate high quality pedagogical content.
- Educating public and lead public discourse on social issues about the potential impacts of informatics and AI, and provide stakeholders including government policy advice on socio-economic aspects.
Academic-Social Outreach Division of NAAMII is currently launching three major programs:
- Virtual Learning Lab
- Annual Winter School
- Collaboration with Educational Institutions
Virtual Learning Lab
NAAMII members abroad co-supervise research projects in Nepal remotely by leveraging existing online tools such as gitlab and video conference apps on NAAMII projects, and on projects of common interests coming from other research institutions in Nepal. NAAMII is working on to build on these existing efforts to create a Virtual Learning Lab where students will be taught, trained and mentored by the experts in the field in coordination with the local NAAMII team.
There is a growing body of students, professionals and enthusiasts in Nepal who are either working or look forward to working in the fields of computing, informatics and AI. On the other hand, there is a thriving Nepali scientific community worldwide, with accomplished Nepali academics and professionals working in those fields. NAAMII’s Virtual Learning Lab will connect those experts with the students in Nepal. Besides providing much-needed personal guidance for the students, it will also institutionalize work carried out by students and supervisors so that the new batch of students can build upon the previous works. The Lab will also serve as a mentorship platform helping students link their passion and skills with existing opportunities and future possibilities. The Learning Lab will employ existing state-of-the-art learning methodologies and technologies, and develop new ones if need be to facilitate the teaching and mentoring process. It will also generate digital learning content, via targeted curation and local productions. There will be forums for cross-project discussions and idea sharing and the learning activities and resources will be compiled for future learners, thus setting up a platform and community for continuous learning and innovation.
Collaboration with Educational Institutions
NAAMII will build strong collaborations with the existing educational and research institutions, national and international, to produce world class researchers in the field of computing sciences, applied mathematics and AI, and to solve challenging local and global problems.
The goals of the collaboration are:
- Providing opportunities for students to get involved in problem-focused research projects with close supervision from experts in the field.
- Helping scientific community to build strong collaborations with existing universities to supervise students at undergraduate and graduate level
- Creating internships, joint Masters and PhD programs
- Modernizing informatics and mathematics higher education in Nepal
- Helping Government formulate policies in tune with the informatics-driven changing world
- Developing awareness in the society about the potential impact of informatics and AI