IBM teams up with IIT Delhi to advance AI research in India

IBM on Thursday joined hands with IIT-Delhi (IIT-D) to partake in a multi-year research collaboration on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in India.

IBM researchers will collaborate with students and professors from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT-D to inculcate in AI systems some key traits like reasoning, comprehension and inferencing.

These may benefit sectors such as healthcare and medicine, finance, and customer support which deal with a complex set of questions and require reasoning, the tech giant said in a statement.

"While working with AI systems, organisations require explicit reasoning and comprehension to reach a particular conclusion. We believe advancement in AI can tackle such problems," said Michael Karasick, Vice President, Global Labs, IBM Research.

"We are excited to collaborate with IIT Delhi to focus on this area of research and empower organisations to make informed decisions by infusing key characteristics like reasoning, comprehension and transparency in their AI systems."

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.

It aims to discover novel AI techniques which can help organisations take informed decisions by being able to logically reason with their AI systems.

AI solutions will be trained to comprehend complex questions using natural language techniques and derive new insights using domain knowledge.

"India has immense talent to accelerate innovation in AI and related technologies. We are happy to collaborate with IBM Research scientists and provide opportunities to our students and faculty colleagues to work on some of the complex problems around AI and apply the solutions to real-world scenarios," said Professor V. Ramgopal Rao, Director, IIT-D.

The teams plan to publish their research in peer-reviewed academic journals and release datasets and open challenges to the research community to identify new areas in making AI decisions better.

--IANS

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