BANGALORE: Mphasis, an IT services and solutions provider specializing in cloud and cognitive services, inaugurated a first of its kind Center of Excellence (CoE) for Cognitive Computing in collaboration with International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B). The CoE will leverage cognitive computing technology to solve problems related to education, enterprises, and accessibility.
Through this pioneering initiative, the center aims to co-create open source IP assets on applied research with relevance to societal and enterprise challenges. The company announced that it will invest more than Rs 50 million over the next three years towards the initiative.
In an effort to use technology and its pervasiveness to address challenges faced by the social and enterprise sectors, Mphasis is collaborating with academia to leverage cognitive technology to co-create a new approach towards a joint solution delivery.
Technologies like accurate speech recognition, machine translation, video analytics, and video synthesis have become a reality due to cognitive science. These have the potential to enable disruptive solutions in Accessibility for Persons with Disabilities (PwDs’), a key focus area of the CoE.
The Centre has initiated a project related to Accessibility in order to develop algorithms that will help real-time synthesis of Indian Sign language. This can be revolutionary in enabling the deaf community to communicate effectively with the hearing community, considerably improving their quality of life and interaction with society. For a country with only 250 certified sign language interpreters translating for a population with hearing impairment ranging from 1.8 million to 7 million, this can be a boon.
Another aspect that the Centre will focus on is to use cognitive computing to solve challenges faced by enterprises. A project under this category that focuses on enabling information convergence for real-time intelligence on social issues is underway.
