IIT Patna Associates with Flipkart for Joint Research in AI, NLP & ML


IIT Patna Associates with Flipkart for Joint Research in AI, NLP & ML

World’s most renowned e-Commerce major Flipkart announced an MoU with IIT Patna to help create industry focused applied research in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). This academic collaboration is expected to bring real world industry exposure to students and scholars of IIT Patna, and to provide an opportunity to the faculty members to work closely with Flipkart on research projects. As a part of this MoU, IIT Patna will undertake a number of programs such as joint research activities, writing research papers, organizing seminars, internship/mentorship opportunities, and many others.

“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,” says Mayur Datar, Chief Data Scientist, Flipkart.

IIT Patna’s Computer Science Professor Asif Ekbal revealed 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. Flipkart works closely with academia through some of the leading institutes including Indian Institute of Science (IISC), IIT (Kharagpur, Bombay & Kanpur), IIM (Ahmedabad & Kolkata) and a few foreign universities like Carnegie Mellon University and University of California, San Diego.

The Indian Institute of Technology Patna (abbreviated IIT Patna or IITP) is an autonomous institute of education and research in science, engineering and technology located in Patna, India. It is recognized as an Institute of National Importance by the Government of India and also as one of the new IITs established by an Act of the Indian Parliament on August 6, 2008.

Flipkart is India’s largest online marketplace and one of India’s leading technology powerhouses that is disrupting the way India shops online. Its dynamic, passionate and talented folks called Flipsters are the linchpins behind this success! They always strive to do the right thing, in the right way at all times.