IBM and MIT partner on AI research

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IBM is planning to spend 240 million US dollars over the next decade to create an artificial intelligence (AI) research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

MIT on Thursday announced the formation of the new MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. It will support joint research by IBM and MIT scientists.

MIT President L. Rafael Reif (L) and John Kelly III, IBM senior vice president, Cognitive Solutions and Research /MIT Photo

Its mission will include advancing the hardware, software and algorithms used for AI. It also will tackle some of the economic and ethical implications of intelligent machines and look at its commercial application for industries ranging from health care to cyber security.

MIT President L. Rafael Reif says the new AI lab builds on a decades-long research relationship between IBM and MIT.

It will be based at the university and IBM’s nearby research center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where over 100 AI scientists, professors and students will jointly do research.

The signing ceremony for the new AI lab /MIT Photo

In addition to its mission to expand the frontiers of AI, the new lab is also expected to mobilize the faculty and students from MIT to establish companies that can help commercialize the lab-developed AI technologies and innovations.

As one of the largest long-term, university-industry cooperation on AI, the new lab with “combined MIT and IBM talent” will “bring formidable power to a field with staggering potential to advance knowledge and help solve important challenges,” said the president.

Long history of IBM-MIT collaboration

In the early 1950s, IBM cooperated with MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory to build a computer to advance the air defense system. In the 1980s, IBM Research and the university both joined a consortium targeting the exploration of electronic applications of superconductivity.

More recently, last September, IBM Research and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences launched a multiyear project in the scientific field of machine vision in a bid to promote this core aspect of AI. Another five-year agreement was announced about two months later between IBM Watson Health and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard on AI and genomics.

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Source(s): AP