Samsung Innovation Campus opens new opportunities for Chilean youth

Samsung Chile, together with the NGO Innovacien, held the graduation ceremony of the fifth Samsung Innovation Campus with the participation of Gloria Moya Coloma, Director of CORFO Metropolitano, Luciano Lee, President of Samsung Electronics Chile, Magda Grundwaldt, Head of Marketing at Samsung Chile, and David Leal, Executive Director of the NGO Innovacien, who was also a professor of the program.

Samsung Innovation Campus 2024 in Chile, which has been running for over five months, selected 118 participants from different parts of the country, with more than 70% of the places allocated to women, to be trained in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. All of them successfully completed the training.

Samsung Innovation Campus classes took place between June and October this year. As part of their learning process, participants had to present on the application of the technologies covered in the training, with improvement projects for real cases in the industry.

"We are proud of the Samsung Innovation Campus and the support that Innovacien gives us in Chile to implement it,” said Paulina Rodríguez, Corporate Citizenship Manager at Samsung Chile. “This course promotes technology with a purpose, which is one of our main focuses as a global company. The objectives of this educational program are to generate social impact, develop technological skills, support young talent, promote employability and promote gender equality. For all these reasons, we also thank the 118 students who were interested in applying and completed their courses, making the most of this opportunity."

Javier Ignacio Retamal Frez, 20, was one of the participants of Samsung Innovation Campus. The young student of Civil Engineering in Computer Science at the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso enrolled in the 2024 program and comments that the experience he had was more than positive.

"I really liked the way the professors explained things. We were able to train artificial intelligence models and see the prediction results, getting the data right," says Javier, who had never been exposed to AI before.

Thanks to the knowledge he gained, he says he would like to work in artificial intelligence or related fields in the future. "AI helps humanity in many ways, such as health, education and security. Thanks to this course, I learned how everything can be applied and improved with artificial intelligence to make tasks easier," he says.

Another participant, 29-year-old nurse María Paulina Salinas Vásquez took the AI course remotely Chillán.

María Paulina, who lives in Chillán with her parents and siblings, took the course to learn about a field that has always interested her. "I have always been interested in learning about data and machine learning. I also wanted to understand how artificial intelligence can be applied in the health sector. The course was very good," she says.

The young woman is currently looking for work and attending interviews, but no longer as a traditional nurse, but also applying for jobs in areas such as statistics and technology applied to health. "With this course, I have discovered a new field of work in health. I have a broader vision to apply for other jobs," explains María Paulina.

Francis Saldías Sanhueza, 21, took the Big Data course. He is currently looking for a professional internship as he is in his fourth year of Information Engineering and Management Control at the University of Chile.

Although he sometimes works, today his efforts are focused on finding an internship and studying. "I took the course because I was immediately interested when I saw it. Throughout my years at the university, I realized that I was very interested in systems and information management, so when I saw the announcement on LinkedIn, I immediately signed up. It is a field that I want to dedicate myself to, and I trust that taking the course will allow me to enhance my job opportunities and set me apart from other graduates," said Francis.

In the Big Data course, Francis says he learned a lot about tools for creating environments that manage databases with large amounts of data, both theoretically and practically (Apache Nifi, Apache Spark, and Hadoop in Virtual Box). "I was also able to practice SQL in MariaDB, a program I had not used before," he adds.

Regarding the classes, he also highlights that a positive aspect is the balance achieved between theoretical material and practical activities, which allows interns to evaluate how their personal learning process is going.