IBM, IIT-Bombay tie up to accelerate AI application

IBM and IIT-Bombay Wednesday announced a tie-up to advance and accelerate the application of artificial intelligence, making the premier college the first outside North America with which the global tech major has collaborated.

IBM has a tie-up with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Renesselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and University of Michigan among others for its 'AI Horizons Network'.

Teams from IIT Bombay's department of computer science and engineering and IBM Research-India will be working to advance and accelerate the application of AI, machine learning, natural language processing and related technologies to business and industry, a joint statement said.

They will investigate new techniques for knowledge representation across documents, graphs, charts, and other forms of multi-media content, it said, adding the research will help the financial services, retail and healthcare sectors.

As part of the collaboration, the two partners will also work on training and building domain-specific AI agents (chatbots), which will aid humans in complex decision making such as making trading and investment choices in financial services, it said.

Domain-neutral training approaches which could enable faster, more efficient training of AI systems will also be explored, it 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," IIT-Bombay's director Devang Khakhar was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, IBM also said that it has signed a 10-year contract with Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail, under which it will help the diversified conglomerate's arm reduce costs, improve productivity enhancements and drive business growth as it expands the store network. The commercial details of the deal were not shared.