Gargi Dasgupta, Director, IBM Research India & CTO, IBM India and South Asia in an exclusive chat with NASSCOM CoE IoT-DSAI about IBM playing a crucial role in advancing AI in India, and why blockchain technology isa transformative solution for industries.

Tell us about the IBM Research Lab and the work it has been doing?

GD: At IBM Research, we work on cutting edge technologies that will further the future of computing. Our focus areas are in using AI to enable journey to the cloud and building cognitive enterprises. IBM Research India Lab is focused on building trusted Artificial Intelligence (AI) on our scalable hybrid cloud platforms and applying it to various domains including retail and agritech in India.

Chatbots are an integral part of business today – how is IBM Research helping make chatbots “smarter”?

GD: There are couple of AI projects that we at IBM Research India are doing on Conversational AI. Conversational agents are going to be a primary way people communicate with and the AI that powers it needs to be very strong. A lot of the failures with current chatbots in the market are because of two main factors:

• Overt dependence on the manual effort for creating chatbots, which makes them both time consuming and brittle
• Lack of an end-to-end fall-back plan with continuous learning and improvement

We, at IBM Research, are working towards training these applications with data by infusing AI and related technologies to help organizations get business value.

What are the most interesting and challenging aspects of working with Indian languages for chatbots?

GD: Human conversations are very rich and diverse in the sense of usage of words, sentences, languages, emotions and contextual references. It is natural for humans to use domain-specific references in their conversation or switch between native language and English. Many such mixed words will not even be present in dictionaries. Natural language parsing, well-understood for English, is not a solved problem for local languages. Another challenge is natural human conversations contain a lot of cross-references. The hardest challenges include the whole diverse range of human language variations, domain contextualization, cross-references, colloquial expressions, and emotions.

Why do you think chatbots are so crucial to business today?

GD: Conversation is the natural medium of interaction and conversational Al agents are going to be a primary way people communicate. They open up new digital channels of communication, can take actions on your behalf, and ease us into 24-hr support. This has the potential to disrupt the customer service industry.

How does access to customer insights help in developing chatbots/enabling their efficiency?

GD: Many a time, enterprises open up chatbots for their front-end business lines as a way to create new channels. However, there is a lot of manual work in configuring these chatbots, feeding intents, entities. Access to customer insights can enable using technology to bootstrap these 70-80% of the way.

Tell us about IBM Research Labs’ efforts to popularize blockchain technology?

GD: IBM Research is deeply invested in building blockchain solutions and platforms. Our Trade Logistics and Food Trust solutions are world-class. We have been also been very active in skills transformation on blockchain through offering online courses through partnership with NPTEL, workshops, and keynotes. We are also working with the government on shaping the BC strategy for the country

What does IBM Research Labs have planned in the near future for AI and Blockchain?

GD: We believe AI and Blockchain will transform enterprises act and think bringing in the era of Cognitive Enterprises.

Source: NASSCOM Community

Image: Flickr