UM Student Residential Project To Benefit Over 40,000 - Zambry

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 1 (Bernama) -- Universiti Malaya (UM) will provide accommodation for more than 40,000 students through the Student Residential Hostel Project, which is expected to be launched by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim on Oct 15.

Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Dr Zambry Abdul Kadir said the project was among the models being developed by the government to accelerate the provision of student accommodation at public universities, amid growing demand for housing.

“At UM, as I understand it, the residential hostel will eventually meet the needs of more than 40,000 students. It will be built in stages, but the immediate basic needs must also be addressed,” he said after launching the ILMUcode platform by YTL AI Labs here today.

Zambry said priority for the accommodation would be given to students from low-income families, particularly those from the B40 group, including those who come from faraway places and cannot afford to secure accommodation on their own.

He stressed that the project was not intended solely to generate income but to help address students’ accommodation needs, particularly those from low-income families.

Meanwhile, UM vice-chancellor Datuk Seri Prof Dr Noor Azuan Abu Osman said the project would be implemented in two phases, with the first providing accommodation for 10,000 students and the second for 30,000.

In another development, Noor Azuan said ILMUcode was the first artificial intelligence (AI)-based coding platform introduced at UM, enabling developers and students to access advanced coding capabilities at a lower cost.

He said the platform, developed in collaboration with YTL AI Labs, combines an agentic AI coding assistant with the ILMU-GLM-5.3 model to help users understand, write and modify code, as well as resolve software development problems more quickly.

“We are proud that Universiti Malaya is the first university in Malaysia to give our computer science students access to next-generation advanced AI coding through ILMUcode.

“Through ILMUcode, we can equip the next generation of Malaysian technology developers and strengthen the local AI talent pipeline,” he said.

-- BERNAMA