IBM and MIT to pursue joint research in artificial intelligence, establish new MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
IBM plans to make a 10-year, $240 million investment in new lab with MIT to advance AI hardware, software, and algorithms.
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, Massachusetts — co-located with the IBM Watson Health and IBM Security headquarters in Kendall Square — and on the neighboring MIT campus.
3Q: Anantha Chandrakasan on new MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab
Lab seeks to expand the boundaries of research on artificial intelligence.
MIT and IBM jointly announced today a 10-year agreement to create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab, a new collaboration for research on the frontiers of artificial intelligence. Anantha Chandrakasan, the dean of MIT’s School of Engineering, who led MIT’s work in forging the agreement, sat down with MIT News to discuss the new lab.
Q: What does the new collaboration make possible?
A: AI is everywhere. It’s used in just about every domain you can think of and is central to diverse fields, from image and speech recognition, to machine learning for disease detection, to drug discovery, to financial modeling for global trade.
This new collaboration will bring together researchers working on the core algorithms and devices that make such applications possible, enabling the pursuit of jointly defined projects. We will focus on basic research and applications, but with new resources and colleagues and tremendous access to real-world data and computational power.
The project will support many different pursuits, from scholarship, to the licensing of technology, to the release of open-source material, to the creation of startups. We hope to use this new lab as a template for many other interactions with industry.
We’ll issue a call for proposals to all researchers at MIT soon; this new lab will hope to attract interest from all five schools. I’ll co-chair the lab alongside Dario Gil, IBM Research VP of AI and IBM Q, and Dario and I will name co-directors from MIT and IBM soon.