IIT Bombay to collaborate with IBM on AI research to build applications
The collaboration between IIT Bombay and IBM will look at accelerating the application of AI technologies that would find use in businesses and industries.
IIT Bombay has become the first institution outside of North America to join IBM’s AI Horizon network and is now part of the elite educational institutes engaged in deep research in this advanced technology.
The relationship between IBM and IIT Bombay will be a multi-year collaboration to advance artificial intelligence (AI) research. Under this partnership, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay will pair its faculty and top graduate students with leading AI scientists from IBM Research – India to advance and accelerate the application of AI, machine learning, natural language processing and related technologies to business and industry.
The eight other leading universities that are part of this network are Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, Universite de Montreal, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, UC San Diego and University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Besides working in various technologies, it will also engage in applications to big societal challenges, like aiding the understanding of disease, education and cybersecurity.
The teams will investigate new techniques for knowledge representation across documents, graphs, charts, and other forms of multimedia content. This area of research will be critical in developing new AI applications in key industries such as financial services, retail and healthcare, which rely heavily on rich, multi-modal content. The collaboration will also work to advance the field of training and building domain-specific AI agents (chatbots), which are designed to aid humans in complex decision making such as making trading and investment choices in financial services. Additionally, work is planned to explore new, domain-neutral training approaches that could enable faster, more efficient training of AI systems.
On the relevance of the collaboration Prof Devang Khakhar, Director, IIT Bombay, in a statement, said, “This partnership will enable the IIT Bombay faculty to work in collaboration with researchers around the world on the frontiers of artificial intelligence focusing on industrially relevant problems and will provide access to large data sets. We look forward to a fruitful collaboration that will make a significant impact on the field.”
Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President, Hybrid Cloud and Director, IBM Research, said, “Through this collaboration with IIT Bombay, we aim to accelerate the pace of innovation for AI in India, working hand-in-hand with some of the top scientists and research scholars in the country."
