A Rs. 20 crore centre for data science and artificial intelligence set up by German company, Robert Bosch, was inaugurated at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras today.

The centre aims at creating societal impact through multidisciplinary interactions with government, academic, research and industrial collaborators on challenges in in data science and artificial intelligence. It will undertake research in many areas like deep learning, reinforcement learning, network analytics, interpretable machine learning, and domain aware artificial intelligence.

" There are basic issues in the way data is collected and shared. There is a need to solve them in a collective and open-sourced manner. To address this issue, a portal of curated India-specific data will also be developed."

Applied research will be taken up in four areas - manufacturing analytics, financial analytics, smart cities, and systems biology and health care. Large datasets are required to improve accuracy of several technologies and to adapt them to the Indian context. There are basic issues in the way data is collected and shared. There is a need to solve them in a collective and open-sourced manner. To address this issue, a portal of curated India-specific data will also be developed.

The new centre will have a large Deep Reinforcement Learning group. Researchers at the centre would, among other things, look at networked data across different disciplines – biology, transportation, water distribution, process modelling, online social media, telecom, and reaction networks.

Dr. Vijendran Venkoparao, an official of Bosch, said “the company has funded two important technology areas with Cyber Physical Systems and Data Sciences and AI at Indian Institute of Science and IIT-M. By working together and conducting aligned R&D activities, they could accelerate major breakthroughs which will have wider societal impact.” Bosch will make the investment of Rs. 20 crores (2.5 million euros) in the centre at IIT Madras over five years, according to an institute press release.
India Science Wire