IIT Bombay, Amazon announce artificial intelligence, machine learning initiative

NEW DELHI : The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and Amazon have jointly launched the Amazon IIT Bombay AI-ML Initiative. The initiative will be housed in the department of computer science and engineering, IIT Bombay, and will advance artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) within speech, language and multimodal AI domains. The initiative will fund research projects, PhD fellowships, and community events, such as research symposia.

Subhasis Chaudhuri, director at IIT Bombay said, “We at IIT Bombay are committed to our mission of translating knowledge and research into revolutionary technologies.” “Our top research minds have always attracted the attention of companies interested in scientific study. With industry collaborators like Amazon who have a deep sense of technology and global reach, we hope to be able to expedite the deployment of technologies/products in the field of AI-ML,” he added.

Also Read | ‘Was it expecting casteist slurs?’ Suicide report exposes IIT Bombay’s ‘apathy’: Activists

According to the institute, Amazon’s sponsorship of this initiative reflects its dedication to addressing complex research challenges in the field of AI with the help of deep collaboration with centers of academic research.

Milind Atrey, IIT Bombay dean of Research and Development said, “This collaboration will foster innovation in three ways, through community projects, research projects, and fellowships, which will indeed spur development in AI and ML domains, as well as other areas, as the relationship progresses.”

Also Read | BTech Placements: How mass tech layoff has put fresher jobs at risk

Rohit Prasad, Alexa senior vice president and head scientist added, "This investment at one of the world's premier academic institutions will bring together Amazon scientists and IIT Bombay students/faculty, leveraging India's multilinguality as a learning lab, to develop new AI systems that can learn and adapt to different languages, accents and dialects. These efforts will help advance the technology fundamental to the future of conversational AI.”

Amazon and IIT Bombay have already collaborated on Amazon Research Awards programme. The most recent award was granted last year to Preethi Jyothi, associate professor of computer science and engineering at IIT Bombay for her work on fairness in speech recognition.