Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The quest for artificial intelligence has advanced substantially in recent years, thanks in good part to breakthroughs in our ability to provide actionable knowledge to computers through what is called machine learning: provided with enough examples, the computer can learn to perform a task, and generalize correctly to new cases. These breakthroughs arose from a machine learning approach called deep learning, inspired from brains and based on older work on artificial neural networks. Initial progress has been in pattern recognition, especially for speech recognition and computer vision. These areas have been revolutionized by deep learning, both in academia and in the information technology industry. This project aims at contributing to the expansion of neural networks outside of their traditional pattern recognition domain into what is called cognitive computing, a strategic area for IBM, one that encompasses artificial intelligence research domains such as natural language understanding, reasoning, machine translation and dialogue, but also takes advantage of progress in computer vision and speech recognition.