Flipkart forges academic collaboration with IIT Patna

• Signs MoU for Joint Research in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

Bengaluru, 18th August 2020: Flipkart, India’s homegrown ecommerce marketplace has announced an MoU with IIT Patna, India’s leading science, engineering and technology institute. The MoU is a step to strengthen Flipkart’s academic collaboration which it has been inculcating for past 5 years now. The MoU with IIT Patna will help create industry focused applied research in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML).

As a part of this MoU, IIT Patna will undertake a number of programs such as joint research activities, writing research papers, organizing seminars, internship / mentorship opportunities to name a few. The academic collaboration is expected to bring real world industry exposure to students and scholars of IIT Patna, and to provide an opportunity to the faculty member(s) to work closely with Flipkart on research projects. Flipkart expects to foster an environment of collaboration in the areas of automation, AI, NLP and ML and help build critical national capabilities.

Said Mayur Datar, Chief Data Scientist Flipkart, “Academic collaborations are a great way to forge long term relationships between industry and academia, to help accelerate the translation of research into new projects and help drive ecosystem benefits which could lead to economic growth. The aim behind this collaboration is to create industry-focused applied research which could help reach ecommerce to more consumers and sellers alike. With this MoU, we aim to establish deeper academia collaborations which could help students and the academia to leverage our data and platform knowledge to work on India specific e-commerce challenges, in addition to publishing research papers.”

Asif Ekbal, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said, “We are very pleased to have this MoU with Flipkart, which has churned out many India specific and India first innovations to solve for adoption of ecommerce in India. The​ research is particularly aimed at developing robust machine translation techniques for translating the large amount of user reviews written in English to the Indian vernacular languages, and at the same time will ensure that the translation process should preserve the domain knowledge (e.g. sentiment, emotion, gender traits etc), which is extremely crucial for the translation service providers (TSPs) that make use of machine translation (MT) in production. Through this initial collaboration, we expect to come up with at least two high-quality publications in the relevant foras, and create a baseline translation workflow in the product review domains. This academic collaboration is expected to bring real world industry exposure to the students and scholars of IIT Patna, and at the same time will provide an opportunity to the faculty member(s) to work closely with Flipkart on research projects.”

Flipkart is vested in long-term advancement of universities in India through impactful academic research aligned to industry needs. Flipkart works closely with academia through some of the leading institutes including Indian Institute of Science (IISC), IIT (Kharagpur, Bombay and Kanpur), IIM (Ahmedabad and Kolkata)  and a few foreign universities like Carnegie Mellon University and University of California, San Diego to develop technologies such as fashion recommendation, query understanding, attribute extraction, demand planning, product categorization, review helpfulness, supply chain management (e.g., warehouse storage allocation), fraud detection and next basket prediction. It has resulted in several research papers in world-class conferences in areas like information retrieval and knowledge discovery.