Hike ties up with IIIT-D to push AI, ML development

Homegrown mobile messaging platform Hike Monday announced collaboration with Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIIT-D) for developing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the country. This collaboration is in line with the company's goal to facilitate research collaboration with Indian universities and research institutions, Hike said in a statement.

"By facilitating this research opportunity, we want to help enable the Indian academia to connect to early-stage research and support the translation of that research to fuel advancement in the AI and ML ecosystem," Anshuman Misra, VP Operations, Hike said.

According to research by Itihaasa, India currently ranks third, far behind China as the leader of research in the field of AI. Through this initiative, Hike aims to help bridge that gap along with stakeholders in the ecosystem .

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"The goal of the research collaboration initiative is to work with stakeholders and academia to help enable more deep-rooted research in AI and ML in the country; and as part of this initiative, Hike is looking to collaborate with Indian institutions to help boost the AI and ML ecosystem in India," the statement said.

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The area of research will comprise natural language processing (NLP), speech, link prediction, deep learning and computer vision.

"A project of this depth is one of the first in the AI and ML ecosystems, and we hope this encourages more Indian academia to partner with Hike. We believe this will play a huge role in facilitating our students to help create a future shaped by open research," Tanmoy Chakraborty, Director, Laboratory for Computational Social Systems (LCS2), IIIT-D said.

The company is currently building one of the largest repositories of AI and ML enabled stickers for its recently announced local messaging platform, Hike Sticker Chat.