KITE to catalyze cooperation between Khronos Members and the educational community teaching Khronos APIs
17th February, 2012 – Taipei, Taiwan – The Khronos™ Group, an industry consortium creating open standards for the acceleration of graphics, parallel computing, dynamic media and sensor processing, today announced the launch of the KITE™ (Khronos Institute for Training and Education) Program. KITE is a community-based, cooperative effort between the Khronos Group organization, its individual members, and the worldwide educational community; to encourage the wide availability of courses and a consistently high-level of quality in education regarding Khronos open standard APIs, such as OpenGL™ ES. The KITE web-site is now available for educators and students to enroll and share courseware: http://www.khronos.org/kite/en/
The KITE Program is designed to enhance and support the efforts of educators teaching Khronos APIs, and provides a wide variety of opportunities for peer communication among educators and facilitates cooperation and collaboration between educators, students, researchers and Khronos Group members including:
“KITE is a much-needed initiative to bridge the gap between industry and academia. The value proposition of Khronos API standards to industry has been well-documented. With KITE, academic and research institutions now have the opportunity to train their students and better prepare them for industry by leveraging the work done within the Khronos working groups. For Khronos, this collaboration with educators will encourage the availability of the skilled workforce needed to drive continued innovation in product development and deployment. KITE is a win-win collaboration for everyone involved,” said Neil Trevett, president of Khronos and vice president of mobile content at NVIDIA.
Korea has taken a leading role in defining and catalyzing the creation of the KITE Program with regular meetings to discuss how Khronos and the academic community can most effectively work together, resulting in the Korean government committing significant financial resources and support KITE in Korea.
“The Khronos KITE program will be essential for effectively teaching Khronos APIs in Korea and we hope that KITE will be an opportunity for academic participants to contribute to standardization in Korea and Khronos,” said Professor Nakhoon Baek at KNU.
The Khronos executive team, numerous work group chairs and Khronos members from Japan and Korea have also visited Taiwan this week to meet with industry, academic and government officials to work together to cooperatively define and respond to the needs of the local education community.
“I am excited and honored to be the first Taipei Chapter Chair for the new Khronos KITE educational program, and I look forward to coordinating the offer of support and assistance from Khronos with other ongoing programs between industry and the educational community here in Taiwan,” said Dr. Jenq-Kuen Lee, Director MOE Embedded Software Consortium and Professor at Department of Computer Science at National Tsing Hua University. “We are using Khronos standards such as OpenCL and we look forward to creating a productive liaison between key Khronos industry members and educators here in Taiwan for the benefit of local and international markets. I think it will be very good for us to train students and engineers to meet international standards.”
“Khronos open standards, such as OpenGL ES, have become ubiquitous in the embedded and mobile markets and so are very significant to the Taiwanese industry. The KITE announcement is very welcome as it will enable a close collaboration between Khronos and the educational community in Taiwan. This will ensure Taiwanese educational programs contain the very latest information about these important international standards,” said Dr. Ouhyoung, National Taiwan University.
Many of the original ideas about the formation and structure of KITE came from Khronos’ discussions with Professor Mike Bailey at Oregon State University. “I am pleased to see KITE gain significant momentum. The number of regional KITE chapters is already growing and the result will be a strong collaborative educational environment,” said Professor Mike Bailey, Oregon State University. “As a teacher of Khronos APIs, I believe that bringing course material, educators and students together in this way will provide companies around the world with highly skilled candidates better prepared for work in innovative environments.”
About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics, parallel computing, dynamic media and sensor processing on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, StreamInput and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.
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