NIT Andhra Pradesh, LinkedIn to collaborate on ML, data analytics research

The National Institute of Technology (NIT), Andhra Pradesh has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Microsoft-backed social networking platform LinkedIn. The collaboration between the two will see the NIT students gain access to LinkedIn’s data and AI platforms, and is aimed at helping them work on open research projects in fields such as machine learning, data analytics and statistical modelling.

The new collaboration seeks to promote researchers working on distributed computing, and help university students to better understand real-world implementations of data analytics and ML. A long term goal of the collaboration is also to help develop and establish faculty curriculum around cloud computing.

This is the second MoU between NIT Andhra Pradesh and LinkedIn, with a previous collaboration between the two being signed in 2020. Under the previous arrangement, researchers at NIT Andhra Pradesh reportedly worked on solving issues around an elastic cloud computing model.

The latter refers to a scalable cloud platform that can accommodate increased server loads. Such a model helps increase the efficiency of a cloud computing and data storage platform.

Karthick Sheshadri, assistant professor at NIT Andhra Pradesh, said, “To resolve problems faced in orchestrating an elastic cloud, we have used workloads sampled from a real-time cloud environment to develop cloud workload characterisation models. Subsequently, we could utilise these models for capacity planning of a cloud server.”

Findings from the above project were published in the peer-reviewed journal, Advances in Data Computing, Communications and Security.

Other cloud computing models developed by the team of researchers headed by Sheshadri can lead to potential business models at data centres, enabling administrators at these facilities to use smarter resource utilisation models and increase the efficiency of operation at these data centres.

Among corporate partnerships with premier educational institutes in India, the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras already has a partnership with Robert Bosch for its data science and artificial intelligence research laboratories. Recently, it also announced a partnership with publishing group Taylor & Francis to bring research projects undertaken by Indian students and professors to the fore.