IBM, IIT Bombay collaborate to accelerate AI research in India

Tech giant IBM on Wednesday announced a partnership with IIT Bombay to advance artificial intelligence (AI) research in India.

As part of the partnership, the varsity will join IBM's "AI Horizons Network", an international consortium of leading universities working with the software major to develop technologies needed to help fulfil the promise of AI.

IIT Bombay will pair its faculty and top graduate students with leading AI scientists from IBM Research to advance and accelerate the application of AI, machine learning (ML), natural language processing and related technologies to business and industry.

"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," Arvind Krishna, Senior-Vice President, Hybrid Cloud and Director, IBM Research, said in a statement.

This area of research will be critical for 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 in the field of training and building domain-specific AI agents (chatbots), which are designed to aid humans in complex decision making such as trading and investment choices in financial services.

Additionally, work is planned 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 AI focusing on industrially relevant problems and will provide access to large data sets," said Prof. Devang Khakhar, Director, IIT Bombay.

This collaboration makes IIT Bombay the first institution outside North America to join the IBM "AI Horizons Network".

Globally, eight leading universities are working with IBM, in key areas designed to accelerate the development of AI technologies, and others, as well as their application to big societal challenges, ranging from aiding the understanding of disease, education and cybersecurity.

They include Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Renesselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, University de Montreal, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, UC San Diego and University of Massachusetts at Amherst.