IBM and IIT Delhi to advance AI Research in India

IBM and IIT Delhi announced that the university will join the AI Horizons Network as part of a multi-year research collaboration on artificial intelligence (AI).

The aim is to discover novel AI techniques, which can help organizations 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.

Today, an AI system is not trained to explain its decision making process. IBM researchers will partner with students and professors from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Delhi to address this issue and conduct joint research to inculcate in AI systems some key traits like reasoning, comprehension and inferencing.

For example, a procurement analyst may not be able to decide the right price for a commodity based on the recommendations shared by a trained AI assistant without knowing why it made those suggestions. The research will benefit sectors such as  Healthcare and Medicine, Finance, and Customer support, which deal with complex set of questions and require reasoning.

“While working with AI systems, organizations require explicit reasoning and comprehension to reach a particular conclusion. We believe advancement in AI can tackle such problems,” said Michael Karasick, VP, Global Labs, IBM Research. “We are excited to collaborate with IIT Delhi to focus on this area of research and empower organizations to make informed decisions by infusing key characteristics like reasoning, comprehension and transparency in their AI systems.”

Prof. V. Ramgopal Rao, Director, IIT Delhi, said: “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.”