Flipkart signs MoU with IIT-Patna

MADURAI: Flipkart has announced a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna to help create industry-focused applied research in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML).
As a part of this MoU, IIT--Patna will undertake a number of programs such as joint research activities, writing research papers, organizing seminars and internship/mentorship opportunities among others.
The collaboration is expected to bring industry exposure to students and provide an opportunity to the faculty members to work closely with Flipkart on research projects.
“The aim behind this collaboration is to create industry-focused applied research which could help reach e-commerce 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," Mayur Datar, chief data scientist, Flipkart, said.
“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 that make use of machine translation in production," Asif Ekbal, associate professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said.
Flipkart said it already works with academia including Indian Institute of Science (IISC), IIT (Kharagpur, Bombay and Kanpur), IIM (Ahmedabad and Kolkata) and a few foreign universities like Carnegie Mellon University and University of California, San Diego.