IIT-Bombay and IBM partner to accelerate AI research in India

Recently, IIT Bombay announced its union with IBM to carry out a more advanced research on artificial intelligence in India. IIT-B is the first non-North-American institute to join IBM’s AI Horizons Network as part of a multi-year collaboration to advance AI research.

“Over its 20-year history, IBM Research – India has been at the forefront of research advances in technologies like AI and blockchain. We have always had strong collaborations with the leading academic institutions in India,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president, Hybrid Cloud and director, IBM Research. “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,” he added.

The teams will explore new techniques for knowledge representation across documents, graphs, charts, and other forms of multi-media content. A statement on IIT-B’s official website says that this his area of research will be critical in helping to develop new AI applications in key industries such as financial services, retail and healthcare, which rely heavily on rich, multi-modal content.

This collaboration will also foster advancements in the field of training and building domain-specific AI agents, designed to aid humans in complex decision-making, such as making trading and investment choices in financial services. Additionally, they are also hoping to explore new, domain-neutral training approaches which could enable faster, more efficient training of AI systems.

“This partnership will enable 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 fruitful collaboration, which will make a significant impact on the field,” Prof. Devang Khakhar, Director, IIT Bombay.

IIT-B becomes the ninth university, and the first outside the North-American Continent, to join the family of eight leading universities working with IBM to accelerate the development of AI technologies, such as deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and others.