IBM renews collaboration with IIT-B and IISc, Bangalore to drive hybrid cloud & artificial intelligence (AI) innovation including generative AI

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today renewed its research collaboration with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore to transform and drive breakthrough innovations in the field of hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence (AI). IIT Bombay joined the IBM AI Horizon Network in 2018 to advance AI research in India and in 2021, IBM and IISc Bangalore launched the IBM-IISc Hybrid Cloud lab to advance research in hybrid cloud technologies and drive breakthrough innovations in this area.

Through the collaboration, IBM aims to drive innovation and provide practical solutions to complex global challenges by tapping the intellectual talent of students, faculty and industry researchers. By pushing the boundaries of knowledge and exploring new approaches, the project seeks to enhance various aspects of technology and contribute to a more advanced and efficient future.

The collaborations will focus on several areas including:

• Extending the prior research in natural language processing and question answering, while striving to provide more comprehensive and accurate responses. In terms of performance optimization, the major focus will be on achieving fast and efficient results when performing inferencing on devices such as smartphones and in hybrid cloud environments.

• Machine learning for time series involving deep generative AI models for multi-variate data, and self-supervised representation learning models. These innovations can bring the power of foundation models and generative AI to multiple application areas such as health care, Industry 4.0 and smarter cities.

• Creating sophisticated computer programs that can detect and explain fake news and half-truths using advanced Artificial Intelligence techniques. The aim is to improve upon the earlier research on biases and trust in AI, making sure that false information is accurately identified and thoroughly explained.

• Building new technologies to orchestrate and optimize workloads in a hybrid cloud environment, including edge clouds, quantum-classical, and serverless. The goal will be to leverage observability and analytics capabilities spanning the hybrid multi-cloud environment to efficiently manage resources and seamlessly orchestrate workloads, to improve the performance and reliability of applications.

• Developing techniques for sustainable computing, involving devising methods to accurately quantify and optimize carbon emissions for hybrid cloud workloads and studying emerging architectures for their performance-power trade-off.

"The synergy between the abundant talent in IIT Bombay and a technological leader like IBM can not only expand the horizons of knowledge but also address problems of national importance, such as affordable healthcare, educational outreach, and smart management of growing industrial and urban infrastructure", added Prof. Sachin Patwardhan, Dean (R&D), IIT Bombay.

"The engagement with IBM researchers is helping us explore some of the practical dimensions of the research challenges in Cloud platforms and sustainability, and investigate the means to democratize access to quantum hardware in the Cloud for scientific and enterprise applications. Our doctoral students also appreciate the chance to engage with leading researchers and practitioners from IBM Research," said Prof Yogesh Simmhan, Associate Professor, Department of Computational and Data Sciences, IISc. The collaboration with IISc is led by Prof Simmhan, along with faculty members Dr J Lakshmi (Supercomputer Education and Research Centre), Prof Parimal Parag (Department of Electrical Communication Engineering) and Prof Prathosh AP (Department of Electrical Communication Engineering).

Speaking on the collaborations Dr Amith Singhee, Director IBM Research India said, "Collaboration fuels innovation, and our collaboration with IIT Bombay and IISc Bangalore underscores the importance of combining diverse expertise. By merging IBM's technological prowess with the cutting-edge research skills of these prestigious institutions, we foster a collaborative ecosystem that pushes the boundaries of scientific discovery. Together, we strive to explore new horizons and address pressing challenges, empowering India's research community to create tangible impact and shape a brighter future for all."

Over the last few years, the collaboration between IBM and IIT Bombay as well as IISc, have yielded significant research outcomes and technological advancements. Spanning topics such as natural language processing, complex question answering, trust and explainability in AI, IT operations, distributed computing, and AI for Code, these collaborations have resulted in numerous research publications, MTech and PhD theses. For instance, the IBM-IIT-Bombay collaborationled to the use of machine learning for Indian Languages NLP and addressed challenges related to low resource understanding of Hindi language sense, intent, sentiment and natively understand documents in Hindi.