IIT Bombay, IISc, IBM collaborate to boost AI, quantum computing research

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have entered into a partnership with IBM. These institutes want to expand their research collaborations so that they can work on artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and next-generation computing technologies.

The collaboration between IIT Bombay and IBM started in 2018. Under the partnership, IBM researchers will work on sovereign AI, Indic language models, multimodal AI, and AI infrastructure. IISc and IBM started the research journey in 2021. The collaboration will include topics like agentic AI systems, AI applications and quantum computing.

Speaking at the event, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Institute Chair Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay, said, “The power of AI is already being demonstrated in systems that can seamlessly understand and reason across languages, modalities and domains. Our joint efforts with IBM Research are laying the foundation for such intelligent systems through advances in multimodal AI models, knowledge retrieval, optimization techniques, agentic AI workflows, AI-assisted software engineering and education.”

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IIT Bombay, IISc to work on emerging technologies

The collaboration at IISc will include research on agentic AI, which refers to AI systems that can do tasks and manage different steps with limited human intervention. The research will find ways to improve how these AI systems work on different computers and systems.

Both IIT Bombay and IISc will also explore AI applications for science. One area explored by the researchers will be energy analytics, where they will develop AI models to help predict energy demand, identify unusual patterns and improve energy use. Another area of research will be quantum computing. At IIT Bombay, the expanded partnership will cover areas including sovereign AI, Indic language models and multimodal AI.

Talking about the future of computing by combining hybrid cloud, Yogesh Simmhan, Professor in the Department of Computational and Data Sciences, IISc, said, “AI agents and quantum technologies. IISc and IBM bring complementary research strengths to jointly explore intelligent, cloud-native platforms that can reason, adapt and orchestrate quantum-classical, edge AI and agentic workflows at scale, translating frontier ideas into trustworthy, sustainable technologies with real-world impact for India and the world.”

The extended partnerships will also promote research across different fields and help academia and industry share their knowledge.