New Delhi - 29 Nov 2018: IBM (NYSE: IBM) and IIT Delhi today 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, Vice President, 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.”

Speaking on the relevance of collaboration 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.”

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.

With this collaboration, IIT Delhi becomes one of the select institutions in India to join the IBM AI Horizons Network (AIHN). Universities like IIT Bombay in India and globally, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Renesselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, Universite de Montreal, University of Maryland at Baltimore County, UC San Diego and University of Massachusetts at Amherst - are working with IBM in key areas designed to accelerate the development of AI technologies. Focus areas include deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and others, as well as their application to big societal challenges, ranging from aiding the understanding of disease to education and cybersecurity.

About IBM Research

For more than seven decades, IBM Research has defined the future of information technology with more than 3,000 researchers in 12 labs located across six continents. Scientists from IBM Research have produced six Nobel Laureates, 10 U.S. National Medals of Technology, five U.S. National Medals of Science, six Turing Awards, 19 inductees in the National Academy of Sciences and 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame. For more information about IBM Research, visit www.ibm.com/research. 

About IIT Delhi

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi is one of more than 20 IITs created to be National Centres of Excellence for training, research and development in science, engineering and technology In India. Established as College of Engineering In 1961, the institute was later declared as an Institution of National Importance under the "Institutes of Technology (Amendment) Act, 1963" and was renamed as "Indian Institute of Technology Delhi'. Since its inception, over 50000 have graduated from IIT Delhi, of which more than 3500 are with a Ph.D. degree, in various disciplines including Engineering, Physical Sciences, Management and Humanities & Social Sciences. In 2018, IIT Delhi also received the special status of Institute of Eminence (IoE) by the Govt. of India, giving it greater autonomy in various matters including hiring of foreign faculty and starting collaborations with foreign institutions. Please visit our website for more: http://www.iitd.ac.in/.