Flipkart’s Collab with IIT Patna
Flipkart has entered into an MoU(memorandum of understanding )with IIT Patna to conduct deep research in the area of translating content in Indian languages through technology to make non-English speaking users more comfortable to shop online. The MoU of Flipkart with IIT Patna will focus on applied research in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. All these will be focused largely on machine translation of languages. Flipkart has already started making its marketplace platform available in non-English Indian languages starting with Hindi, and it has been extended the option to another three more languages. This extends to understanding the nuances of the languages also a mix where sometimes English words are used together.
IIT Patna has built deep expertise in the area of machine translation. The collaboration between Flipkart and IIT Patna will aim at technology solutions which can be implemented at the marketplace, something like applied research. Besides, there will also be a publication of high-quality research papers on this subject. In this alliance, Flipkart will bring computing power, data and the business challenges to solve while IIT Patna will have its deep expertise in this area of technology.
Flipkart has been engaged with academic institutions like Indian Institute of Science (IISC), IIT (Kharagpur, Bombay and Kanpur), IIM (Ahmedabad and Kolkata) and a few foreign universities like Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, San Diego.
These partnerships broaden our reach and increase the depth of research. In this area of machine translation for languages, Indian institutions are lot more qualified.”
Mayur Datar.
These partnerships address the various business challenges of an e-commerce marketplace and come out with solutions. Flipkart believes that these kinds of partnerships will be a continuous road to improvements where they have a better understanding of their customers.
