Jio Institute Offering Undergraduate Courses in AI & Data Science From 2021

Mukash Ambani is once again ready to revolutionize an industry & this time it will the education sector.
Reliance Foundation’s Jio Institute this week announced that they are launching graduate courses in AI, data sciences, and digital media and integrated marketing communications for its first academic year.


The academic session of all these courses will start in 2021. The Artifical Intelligence undergraduate courses will be led by Shailesh Kumar, who is the chief data scientist for Reliance-Jio.
The marketing communications course will be developed by Mulhem from Northwestern University. The state-of-the-art Jio Digital Library project will be headed by Keller from Stanford.

The institute is expected to have a sprawling campus across 800 acres and will be located at Navi Mumbai.
The Mukesh Ambani group is said to have informed the Empowered Expert Committee of all selected Institutes of Eminence during a review on November 16 that the design for its 40,000 square foot building campus complex in Navi Mumbai is in place.

In a media report, Jio University has confirmed that it had formed a seven-member Global Advisory Council ahead of its academic session in 2021 with Rs 1,000 crore of funding ploughed in and a committed annual endowment of Rs 100 crore, the Reliance Group told the Centre.
The advisors in the power-packed Advisory Council will be Jean Lou Chameau, president of the emeritus of California Institute of Technology (Caltech); Rick Levin, former president of Yale University.

Other members are Subra Suresh, president of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University; Michael Keller, vice provost of Stanford University; Nadhmi A Al-Nasr, CEO of Saudi Arabia’s futuristic habitat project and Frank J Mulhern and Vinayak P Dravid of Northwestern University, according to The Economic Times.

A high-powered Governing Council has been set up that also includes members of the Ambani family, for the first greenfield project to be certified as an ‘Institute of Eminence’ by the government.
Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani, his wife Nita Ambani and daughter Isha Ambani Piramal are in the council along with R Venkataramanan, the former managing trustee of Tata Trusts who joined Reliance Industries in June to lead the group’s social initiatives.

Other members include Bimal Patel President of CEPT University in Ahmedabad and director of HCP Design, Planning and Management, the company selected to redevelop New Delhi’s Central Vista.


Vikram S Mehta, chairman of Brookings India, and Vinay Sheel Oberoi, former secretary in human resource development ministry, are also in the council as are Jio Institute chancellor RA Mashelkar, vice-chancellor Dipak C Jain and Pradeep Khosla, chancellor of the University of California, San Diego.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development had granted the eminence status to the Jio Institute even before it went operational. The institute, however, has been under the heat since it was the only proposed institute to be accorded this status back in 2018.

This status was reportedly given solely on the basis of future prospects.

The institute is expected to hire university staff and prepare an academic curriculum by October 2020, ET reported citing the company’s response to the government’s EEC.
The Jio institute is eyeing global academic experts to be a part of its faculty. It is in talks with universities like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, Northwestern University and Nanyang Technological University to bring in faculty experts and mentors to the institute.

In July 2019, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) informed the empowered expert committee (EEC) of all the members of the Institutes of Eminence about its ambitious plan of investing over INR 1.5K Cr in its proposed university for the next two years to ensure quality education.

This decision came after EEC had expressed its disinterest in the Jio Institute being part of Institutes of Eminence in April 2019. However, on November 16, 2019, during a review with EEC, Jio Institute claimed that its Mumbai campus, which is spread across 40,000 sq. ft is in place.
The EEC committee then gave a green signal to all its plans.

According to the latest report by Research and Markets, titled ‘Growth Opportunities in the Education Technology market – Forecast to 2022,’ the global edtech market is expected to grow to $40.9 Bn by 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.3%.

Reliance Foundation’s Jio University was among six colleges that were selected as Institutions of Eminence a status that will ensure complete autonomy and facilitate them to make a mark in global rankings.

Apart from Jio Institute – which is yet to established, the other five institutions were Indian Institute of Science- Bangalore, IIT-Bombay, IIT-Delhi, Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (known as BITS-Pilani) and Manipal Academy of Higher Education.