One of the world's leading engineering company Bosch has opened The Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI) at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-Madras). The center was inaugurated on February 6, 2019.

During the inauguration ceremony, Dr. Michael Bolle, member of Bosch's board of management expressed his views on AI and said – "Artificial Intelligence is a core technology for all areas of connected life – from connected mobility to buildings, factories, and cities. The expertise of our Indian engineers contributes to expanding the AI skills set of Bosch."

The company is expected to invest around 2.5 million euros (20 crores) over the next five years of a span to achieve the mission of a new center. The objective behind the set-up of this center is to develop societal impact via multidisciplinary interactions on basic challenges in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

Focusing on the core of deep learning, reinforcement learning, network analytics, domain aware AI, interpretable machine learning and others, RBC-DSAI will shoulder prime research. These research would adapt research project, knowledge management and circulation, outreach projects and the establishment of collaborative laboratories.

Throwing some more light on center's objective, Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director, IIT Madras asserted – "The center's mandate requires interaction with industry and other universities, including international student and faculty exchanges. The objective is to advance scientific innovation for societal benefit."

Reportedly, the loop of applied research will commence in four different steep including manufacturing analytics, financial analytics, smart cities, and systems biology & health care.

For proper adaptation of the above technologies, the industry needs to bridge the loopholes in them starting from improvement in large datasets accuracy issue. Another additional drawback is in the way collection and sharing of data is done. This very issue needs to be tackled in a collaborative and open-sourced manner. Addressing these drawbacks, Prof. B. Ravindran, who heads RBC-DSAI says – "The center, in addition to fundamental research, is setting out on an ambitious task of creating a portal of curated, India specific data sets that are easy to access and interpret through a set of open tools and interfaces."

A number of revolutionary developments in AI are on the way with the introduction of deep reinforcement learning technology.

The IIT-Madras's data science center has prodigious Deep Reinforcement Learning group in the nation. Researchers here are looking at networked data across regimes including biology, transportation, water distribution, process modeling, online social media, telecom, and reaction networks.

Dr. Vijendran Venkoparao, head of technology strategy and university relations at Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions describing the fundings of the company expressed – "Bosch has funded two important technology areas with Cyber-Physical Systems and Data Sciences and AI at IISc (Indian Institute of Science) and IIT-M. By working together and conducting aligned R&D activities, they could accelerate major breakthroughs which will have wider societal impact."

Further, Vijay Ratnaparkhe, president and managing director at Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions putting forward the partnership between the institute and company said – "This partnership between Bosch and IIT-M will accelerate research for societal impact, taking a long term view for India."