The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, on Wednesday joined hands with IBM Research to carry out advanced research in the field of Artificial Intelligence, becoming the ninth institute to join the AI Horizons Network – a research collaborative of IBM.
As part of a multi-year collaboration, the department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT-B will pair graduate students with scientists from IBM Research-India to accelerate the application of AI, machine learning, natural language processing and related technologies for business and industry.
Teams will investigate new techniques for knowledge representation across documents, graphs, charts, and other forms of multi-media content, developing new applications in retail and healthcare industries among others.
Under IBM’s AI Horizon Network, Researchers at IBM, world-class faculty, and top graduate students work together on a series of advanced research projects and experiments designed to accelerate the application of artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing and related technologies. Projects are merely designed to apply the technologies to some of the world’s most enduring challenges which people are facing, which is ranging from disease and the environment to transportation and education. The Network also addresses the entire Artificial Intelligence stack from analyzing the unstructured and structured data required to train these systems to building the new computing infrastructures needed to optimize the new data-intensive workloads of a truly digital world.
The IIT-Bombay & IBM collaboration will also going to work to advance the field of training and building with respect to the domain-specific AI agents (chatbots), which are merely designed to aid humans in complex decision-making such as making trading and investment choices in financial services. Apart from that, work is planned to explore new, domain-neutral training approaches which could enable faster, more efficient training of AI systems.
Devang Khakhar, the director, IIT-B, said: “The 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 provide access to large data sets. We look forward to a fruitful collaboration, which will make a significant impact on the field.”
IIT-B is the only institution outside North America to be included in the AI Horizons Network.