Hike bets big on Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML): Pioneers research collaboration with Indian universities & research institutions

Hike, India’s homegrown tech & internet start-up, today announced its research collaboration with Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIIT-D). This collaboration is in line with the company’s goal to facilitate research collaboration with Indian universities & research institutions. The goal of the research collaboration initiative is to work with stakeholders and academia to help enable more deep-rooted research in AI & ML in the country. As part of this initiative, Hike is looking to collaborate with Indian institutions to help boost the AI & ML ecosystem in India.

Research & innovation is at the core of what Hike does. The company believes that multiple collaborations across academic disciplines can best leverage the bright minds of the country. Building on each other’s work also solves many fundamental challenges of the country. This first-of-its-kind initiative by Hike is also aimed at enabling an ecosystem of research within the country that will help advance technological competence and know-how in the field of AI & ML. This will include new age research-led innovation in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Speech, Link Prediction, Deep Learning and Computer Vision.

“We are extremely excited about the talent & innovation present in this country, through our research collaborations we aim to help nourish this talent further. By facilitating this research opportunity, we want to help enable the Indian academia to connect to early-stage research and support the translation of that research to fuel advancement in the AI & ML ecosystem,” added Anshuman Misra, VP Operations, Hike.

“Hike has created India’s only local, homegrown messaging platform that is working towards helping solve India’s input problem and reduce dependency on the keyboard. This puts us in a unique position to not only improve the communication experience for millions of users but also provide Indian academics great opportunities to apply their research on hard real-world problems,” added Anshuman.

“We are extremely proud to be beginning this partnership with Hike. A project of this depth is one of the first in the AI & ML ecosystems, and we hope this encourages more Indian academia to partner with Hike. We believe this will play a huge role in facilitating our students to help create a future shaped by open research,” said Tanmoy Chakraborty, Director, Laboratory for Computational Social Systems (LCS2), Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi.

Hike has put AI & ML at the heart of innovation. The company is currently building one of the largest repositories of AI & ML enabled stickers for its recently announced local messaging platform, Hike Sticker Chat. The platform already has over 30,000 stickers across 40 + languages & dialects and aims to have almost 100,000 stickers by the end of the year covering a large chunk of popular local languages & dialects. The company is currently working on a range of White papers, projects, and initiatives. It is also looking to collaborate with more academia, details of which can be attained on its recently launched website – https://ai.hike.in/

Some of Hike’s other initiatives to encourage the AI & ML ecosystem in India include — one of the biggest ML hackathons in the country, White Papers & internship opportunities for students.