IBM and IIT Bombay team up to accelerate AI research in India

Mumbai, September 12, 2018– IBM (NYSE: IBM) and IIT Bombay today announced that the university will join the AI Horizons Network as part of a multi-year collaboration to advance AI research. The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay is one of the preeminent research institutions in the world, with a long history of leadership in data mining and information retrieval systems. By joining the AI Horizons Network, IIT Bombay will pair its world-class faculty and top graduate students with leading AI scientists from IBM Research – India to advance and accelerate the application of AI, machine learning, natural language processing and related technologies to business and industry.

Teams will investigate new techniques for knowledge representation across documents, graphs, charts, and other forms of multi-media content. This 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. The collaboration will also work to advance the field of training and building domain-specific AI agents (chatbots), which are designed to aid humans in complex decision making such as making 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.

“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.”

Speaking on the relevance of collaboration Prof. Devang Khakhar, Director, IIT Bombay said “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.”

With this collaboration, IIT Bombay becomes the first institution outside North America to join the IBM AI Horizons Network. Globally, eight leading universities – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Renesselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, Universite de Montreal, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, UC San Diego and University of Massachusetts at Amherst – are working with IBM, in key areas designed to accelerate the development of AI technologies, such as deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and others, as well as their application to big societal challenges, ranging from aiding the understanding of disease, education and cybersecurity.