At IBM Think Singapore 2024, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) announced plans to engage in a strategic collaboration to establish a new AI research and innovation center. The center would aim to accelerate scientific research by leveraging IBM’s comprehensive AI infrastructure and a selection of open source models, including IBM’s flagship Granite model series. Based at the NUS School of Computer ScienceBoth envision the center to feature the first comprehensive AI infrastructure system installed on a university campus in Asia Pacific by IBM.
This willingness to work together demonstrates the strong desire of Singapore’s research and innovation ecosystem to collaborate with industry leaders, such as IBM, to deliver Singapore’s national AI strategy. Equipped with a comprehensive AI infrastructure and supported by the strong research expertise of NUS and IBM, the centre will aim to serve as an innovation platform for Singapore’s agencies, academic and research institutions, as well as businesses, to jointly conduct cutting-edge AI research with significant translational potential.
The parties envision that a cornerstone of the center will be to promote a sustainability-focused “open innovation” approach to developing AI technologies across the stack, with much broader potential to improve the quality and pace of adoption of new AI technologies. In addition, the parties hope to work together to develop tools and methodologies that help build trust in AI.
Powering the future of AI research with IBM’s industry-leading AI accelerators and a full stack of open source, cloud-native, end-to-end software
IBM and NUS propose to install an AI-optimized computing infrastructure at NUS, which will include IBM AIU accelerators optimized for efficient inference of AI workloads. The AI-optimized computing infrastructure would run on the IBM Watsonx data and AI platform and the Red Hat hybrid cloud platform. The proposed collaboration would leverage NUS’ expertise to drive technological advancement in AI, enabling more powerful, efficient, and versatile AI systems that can tackle increasingly complex tasks.
Priya Nagpurkar, Vice President, Hybrid Cloud and AI Platform at IBM Research, said: “We are excited to take this first step towards collaborating with NUS to drive breakthrough AI research. IBM and NUS share a common goal of enabling innovations in AI and sustainable computing, and we look forward to continuing this collaboration.”
Professor Liu Bin, NUS Vice-President (Research and Technology), said: “We are very excited to collaborate with IBM. We envision a future in which an open ecosystem is essential to harness the best of collective intelligence. Building on the new NUS Institute of Artificial Intelligence “Through our commitment to green computing and sustainability, announced earlier this year, we aim to be the driving force in meeting the industry’s growing demand for artificial intelligence, cultivating a strong talent pool, and contributing to Singapore’s decarbonisation efforts.”
Helping to develop local high-tech startups
To provide a complete solution, the proposed collaboration would allow NUS Graduate Research and Innovation Programme (GRIP)a high-tech entrepreneurship program, in collaboration with local startups as well as small and medium-sized enterprises, to access the AI innovation platform with Red Hat OpenShift AI for management and execution needs and IBM’s Watsonx platform.
