Dr. Sunil Kumar Vuppala is the Director of Data Science at Ericsson’s Global Artificial Intelligence Accelerator (GAIA) in Bengaluru. With 17+ years of experience in both product and service organisations across healthcare, telecom, energy, manufacturing and IoT verticals, his current assignment is to build a world class data science team as well as define and execute forward-looking AI initiatives in alignment with Ericsson’s global strategy. In an exclusive interaction with INDIAai, Sunil shares his views on how AI is transforming the telecom sector. He also talks about the AI focus of the Ericsson R&D in India.

Ericsson in India

With a portfolio spanning Networks, Digital Services, Managed Services, and Emerging Businesses, Ericsson enables communications service providers to capture the full value of connectivity. Ericsson’s innovation investments have delivered the benefits of mobility and mobile broadband to billions of people around the world.

Ericsson is not new to India. In fact, Ericsson has been powering connectivity solutions in India for more than 117 years. It was the first telecom company to Make in India in 1994. And now, the company is investing in advanced AI R&D in India to help accelerate the adoption of AI technologies across its portfolio.

“Ericsson is leading the way in transforming industry and society with its cutting edge 5G solutions. 5G networks offer high throughput, ultra-reliability, low latency, and security – these are necessary for enabling mission critical services that run on 5G networks such as tele-medicine, autonomous connected vehicles and smart factories. AI technologies play a crucial role by ensuring critical performance while reducing network complexity through the use of advanced AI-based predictive and prescriptive techniques,” explains Sunil.

Betting big on AI research

Ericsson R&D has a strong presence in India, with two specific units focused on AI research and development: Global AI Accelerator (GAIA) in Bengaluru, and Ericsson Research (ER) in Chennai.

“GAIA’s focus is on accelerating the adoption of AI and ML technologies across Ericsson’s products and services while ER has a longer-term technology horizon with a focus on new/emerging AI technologies that can have a significant impact on the telecom industry,” explains Sunil.

GAIA has been set up as a center of AI excellence to accelerate the AI roadmaps across all Ericsson’s Business Units and Market Areas around the world. GAIA India was established in 2019 and is actively engaged in several AI initiatives covering a broad spectrum of the telecom portfolio, including 5G and IoT.

ER is the central research organisation within Ericsson, with a mission to provide Ericsson with system concepts, technology and methodology, and to secure long-term competitive product positioning. World-class innovation is achieved through cooperation within Ericsson and with partners, customers, universities and research institutes. Ericsson Research was established in India in 2010, with a focus on advanced AI/ML technologies including Machine Reasoning, Knowledge Representation, Distributed AI and Trustworthy AI.

Getting the right mix

Ericsson India is uniquely positioned to leverage the presence of both GAIA and ER teams to drive progress both in the research of innovative AI technologies and the industrialisation of AI technologies, according to Sunil.

He adds, “Our uniqueness lies in how we have intertwined Ericsson’s domain expert knowledge and data from the networks. By knowing exactly what data to collect at the node, we can, for instance, do a real-time intelligent load balancing without compromising the performance of the node. The real value of AI is not just limited to applications which connect to the network but will ultimately be realised in the networks themselves. As part of our zero-touch networks initiative, we are leveraging our extensive domain knowledge together with one of the largest data sets in the industry, to develop self-healing, self-organising and self-configuring autonomous telecom networks.”

He further sheds light on machine learning and machine reasoning, which are the core focus areas for the Ericsson AI Research team in India.

“Machine Reasoning (MR), as a field of AI, uses largely symbolic means to formalise and emulate abstract reasoning. A particular area of interest in Machine Reasoning is Trustworthy AI, that aims to address both safety and explainability aspects of AI solutions – this is a critical challenge facing the AI community today. We also focus on modern Machine Reasoning topics such as argumentation i.e., applying argumentation for reasoning for conflict-resolution and explainability in network orchestration; constraint and logic programming; and AI planning (reasoning action sequences to achieve a goal from a given state).”

He goes on to add, “Safe AI is another area where there is a need to ensure that  AI systems align with intents, even as they evolve. This includes sub-topics such as safe state-space exploration in RL, verification of AI modules or explainability in multi-agent systems and trustworthy AI. Causal AI is another area where the focus is on the understanding of cause-and-effect relationships and provides critical insights that predictive models fail to provide.”

Diverse research interests

Other research interests for Ericsson’s AI research teams include Cognitive reasoning​, Distributed/multi agent Reinforcement Learning (RL)​, AI planning at scale, Formal methods in RL​, Explainable AI planning​, Explainable AI and Causality​,  Radio analytics for sensing, Device-free localization, Causality Theory​, AI planning​, Quantum AI​ and Few Shot Learning.

“We are leveraging AI in telecom towards our vision of zero touch networks of the future to automatically determine which actions to take with minimal human intervention. However,  deploying AI in telecom networks will require the  latest advances in AI  technologies to address key challenges such as building ethical and trusted AI models,” says Sunil.

We are participating in India AI stack and standardisation activities of the Department of Telecommunication. We have strong partnerships with telecom service providers, industry stakeholders, and start-ups. We are also collaborating with top universities in India and abroad, that are engaged in cutting edge research in these areas,” he concludes.

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