Leading e-commerce player Flipkart has entered into Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Indian Institute of Technology Patna (IIT Patna) on Tuesday to jointly create industry focused applied research in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML).
As a part of the MoU, IIT Patna will undertake a number of programmes like joint research activities, writing research papers, organising seminars, internship and mentorship opportunities.
"Academic collaborations are a great way to forge long term relationships between industry and academia, to help accelerate the translation of research into new projects and help drive ecosystem benefits which could lead to economic growth. The aim behind this collaboration is to create industry-focused applied research which could help reach ecommerce to more consumers and sellers alike. With this MoU, we aim to establish deeper academia collaborations which could help students and the academia to leverage our data and platform knowledge to work on India specific e-commerce challenges, in addition to publishing research papers," said Mayur Datar, Chief Data Scientist Flipkart, in a statement.
The academic collaboration is expected to bring real-world industry exposure to students and scholars of IIT Patna and provide an opportunity for faculty members to work closely with Flipkart on research projects, said the e-commerce marketplace in a statement on Tuesday.
"The research is particularly aimed at developing robust machine translation techniques for translating the large amount of user reviews written in English to the Indian vernacular languages, and at the same time will ensure that the translation process should preserve the domain knowledge (e.g. sentiment, emotion, gender traits etc), which is extremely crucial for the translation service providers (TSPs) that make use of machine translation (MT) in production," said Asif Ekbal, Associate Professor, IIT Patna.
The company works closely with academia through some of the leading institutes including Indian Institute of Science (IISC), IIT (Kharagpur, Bombay and Kanpur), IIM (Ahmedabad and Kolkata) and foreign universities like Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California at San Diego.
It has resulted in several research papers at world-class conferences in areas like information retrieval and knowledge discovery.
(With ANI inputs)