The grant is to promote greater R&D collaboration and accelerate pace of innovation.
Accenture has awarded 11 research grants to leading universities across the globe, out of which four are Indian institutions —the Indian Institutes of Technology(IIT), Mumbai and Chennai, the Indian Institute of Science (IIS ), Bengaluru and the Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (BITS), Pilani .
The grant helps to support the ground-breaking efforts of leading university research teams, who will be invited to work in collaboration with researchers from the Accenture Technology Labs on R&D projects. These projects will be of strategic importance to the technology industry and Accenture’s enterprise clients.
“Universities are a critical source of technical and scientific research that can deliver long-term business benefits for organisations around the world,” says Prith Banerjee, managing director of Global Technology R&D, Accenture.
This initiative will enable the researchers of Accenture Technology Labs to translate a university’s conceptual research —spanning topics from cyber security to 3D printing and cognitive computing — into ideas that can ultimately help solve real business challenges for our enterprise clients.
IIT Mumbai will focus on developing a text-to-universal language converter and creating more robust and accurate natural language processing capabilities. IIT Chennai, on the other hand, will develop decision-making algorithms to conceptualise and develop cognitive learning systems. It will leverage a principled combination of bottom-up, data-driven techniques, such as machine learning, and top-down knowledge-based approaches classically used in planning and reasoning.
The BITS Pilani project will ensure dependability of software systems, making them reliable and available, based on a recovery-oriented approach. The proposed approach has its foundation in near-real time assessment, remediation of dependability bottlenecks of operational systems and design strategies to build dependable software.
The project at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, aims to harvest knowledge from large text datasets, using them to improve accuracy and coverage of cognitive computing systems.
In addition to the monetary grant, the university researchers will benefit from the perspectives that Accenture Technology Labs researchers have to offer, given their direct exposure to the enterprise business contexts in which the research would ultimately be applied.
The programme provides the opportunity for Accenture and university researchers to combine their expertise, learn from each other and achieve more than either could alone.
