CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept.
7, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and MIT today announced that IBM plans to make a
10-year, $240 million investment to
create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab in partnership with MIT. The lab will carry out fundamental artificial
intelligence (AI) research and seek to propel scientific
breakthroughs that unlock the potential of AI. The collaboration
aims to advance AI hardware, software and algorithms related to
deep learning and other areas, increase AI's impact on industries,
such as health care and cybersecurity, and explore the economic and
ethical implications of AI on society. IBM's $240 million investment in the lab will support
research by IBM and MIT scientists.
The new lab will be one of the largest long-term
university-industry AI collaborations to date, mobilizing the
talent of more than 100 AI scientists, professors, and students to
pursue joint research at IBM's Research Lab in Cambridge—co-located
with the IBM Watson Health and IBM Security headquarters in Kendall
Square, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts—and on the neighboring MIT campus.
For information about employment opportunities with IBM at the
new AI Lab, please visit MITIBMWatsonAILab.mit.edu.
The lab will be co-chaired by IBM Research VP of AI and IBM Q,
Dario Gil, and Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of MIT's School of
Engineering. IBM and MIT plan to issue
a call for proposals to MIT researchers
and IBM scientists to submit their ideas for joint research to push
the boundaries in AI science and technology in several areas,
including:
- AI algorithms: Developing advanced algorithms to expand
capabilities in machine learning and reasoning. Researchers will
create AI systems that move beyond specialized tasks to tackle more
complex problems, and benefit from robust, continuous learning.
Researchers will invent new algorithms that can not only leverage
big data when available, but also learn from limited data to
augment human intelligence.
- Physics of AI: Investigating new AI hardware materials,
devices, and architectures that will support future analog
computational approaches to AI model training and deployment, as
well as the intersection of quantum computing and machine learning.
The latter involves using AI to help characterize and improve
quantum devices, and also researching the use of quantum computing
to optimize and speed up machine-learning algorithms and other AI
applications.
- Application of AI to industries: Given its location in
IBM Watson Health and IBM Security headquarters and Kendall Square, a global hub of biomedical
innovation, the lab will develop new applications of AI for
professional use, including fields such as health care and
cybersecurity. The collaboration will explore the use of AI in
areas such as the security and privacy of medical data,
personalization of healthcare, image analysis, and the optimum
treatment paths for specific patients.
- Advancing shared prosperity through AI: The MIT-IBM
Watson AI Lab will explore how AI can deliver economic and societal
benefits to a broader range of people, nations, and enterprises.
The lab will study the economic implications of AI and investigate
how AI can improve prosperity and help individuals achieve more in
their lives.
In addition to IBM's plan to produce innovations that advance
the frontiers of AI, a distinct objective of the new lab is to
encourage MIT faculty and students to
launch companies that will focus on commercializing AI inventions
and technologies that are developed at the lab. The lab's
scientists also will publish their work, contribute to the release
of open source material, and foster an adherence to the ethical
application of AI.
"The field of artificial intelligence has experienced incredible
growth and progress over the past decade. Yet today's AI systems,
as remarkable as they are, will require new innovations to tackle
increasingly difficult real-world problems to improve our work and
lives," said Dr. John Kelly III, IBM
senior vice president, Cognitive Solutions and Research. "The
extremely broad and deep technical capabilities and talent at
MIT and IBM are unmatched, and will
lead the field of AI for at least the next decade."
"I am delighted by this new collaboration," says
MIT President L. Rafael Reif. "True breakthroughs are often
the result of fresh thinking inspired by new kinds of research
teams. The combined MIT and IBM talent
dedicated to this new effort will bring formidable power to a
field with staggering potential to advance knowledge and help
solve important challenges."
Both MIT and IBM have been pioneers
in artificial intelligence research, and the new AI lab builds on a
decades-long research relationship between the two. In 2016, IBM
Research announced a multi-year collaboration with MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences to
advance the scientific field of machine vision, a core aspect of
artificial intelligence. The collaboration has brought together
leading brain, cognitive, and computer scientists to conduct
research in the field of unsupervised machine understanding of
audio-visual streams of data, using insights from next-generation
models of the brain to inform advances in machine vision. In
addition, IBM and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have
established a five-year, $50 million
research collaboration on AI and Genomics.
MIT researchers were among those who
helped coin and popularize the very phrase "Artificial
Intelligence" in the 1950s. MIT pushed
several major advances in the coming decades, from neural networks
to data encryption to quantum computing to crowdsourcing.
Marvin Minsky, a founder of the
discipline, collaborated on building the first artificial neural
network and he, along with Seymour
Papert, advanced learning algorithms. Currently, the
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Media
Lab, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the MIT
Institute for Data, Systems, and Society serve as connected hubs
for AI and related research at MIT.
For more than 20 years, IBM has explored the application of AI
across many areas and industries. IBM researchers invented and
built Watson, which is a cloud-based AI platform being used by
businesses, developers and universities to fight cancer, improve
classroom learning, minimize pollution, enhance agriculture and oil
and gas exploration, better manage financial investments and much
more. Today, IBM scientists across the globe are working on
fundamental advances in AI algorithms, science and technology that
will pave the way for the next generation of artificially
intelligent systems.
For more information, visit MITIBMWatsonAILab.mit.edu.
CONTACTS:
Chris Andrews
IBM Media Relations
845-612-6142
candrews@us.ibm.com
Sarah McDonnell
Media Relations Manager
MIT News Office
o: 617-253-8923/m: 617-460-9583
s_mcd@mit.edu
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SOURCE IBM