IBM and NUS Announce Intent to Establish a Research and Innovation Center with Aim to Accelerate Advanced Research to Drive Adoption of AI Innovations within Singapore

IBM and NUS Announce Intent to Establish a Research and Innovation Center with Aim to Accelerate Advanced Research to Drive Adoption of AI Innovations within Singapore

At the annual IBM Think Singapore 2024, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) announced an intention to engage in a strategic collaboration to establish a new AI research and innovation center. The center would aim to accelerate scientific research leveraging IBM's full-stack AI infrastructure and a selection of open-source models, including IBM's flagship series of Granite models. Based at the NUS School of Computing, the two envision that the center will feature the first such full-stack AI infrastructure system installed on a university campus in Asia-Pacific by IBM.

The intention to work together demonstrates the strong commitment by Singapore's research and innovation ecosystem to collaborate with industry leaders, such as IBM, to realise Singapore's National AI Strategy. Equipped with full AI infrastructure and supported by the strong research expertise of NUS and IBM, the center will aim to serve as an innovation platform for Singapore agencies, academic and research institutions, as well as companies to jointly conduct cutting-edge AI research with significant translational potential.

The parties envision that a cornerstone of the center will be to advance a sustainability focused "open innovation" approach to developing AI technologies across the stack, to have a much broader potential to improve the quality and pace of adoption of new AI technologies. Additionally, 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 state-of-the-art AI accelerators and a full stack of open-source, cloud native, and end-to-end software

IBM and NUS propose to install a full-stack AI-optimized computing infrastructure at NUS that will include IBM AIU accelerators that are optimized for the efficient inferencing of AI workloads. The AI-optimized computing infrastructure would operate on the IBM watsonx data and AI platform and Red Hat hybrid cloud platform. The proposed collaboration would leverage NUS' expertise to drive technological progress 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, IBM Research, said, "We are pleased to take this first step toward collaboration with NUS to power breakthrough AI research. IBM and NUS share a common goal to enable innovations in AI and sustainable computing, and we look forward to furthering this collaboration."

Professor Liu Bin, NUS Deputy President (Research and Technology), said, "We are very excited about this opportunity to collaborate with IBM. We envision a future where an open ecosystem is most vital to harness the best of collective intelligence. Building on the new NUS AI Institute announced earlier this year and the University's commitment to green computing and sustainability, we aim to be the leading force in addressing rising industry demand for AI intelligence, cultivating a robust talent pool and contributing to Singapore's decarbonization efforts."

Helping to grow local deep-tech startups

To provide a full stack solution, the proposed collaboration would enable the NUS Graduate Research Innovation Programme (GRIP), a deep tech entrepreneurship program, together with local startups as well as small and medium-sized enterprises, to gain access to the AI Innovation Platform with Red Hat OpenShift AI for management and runtime needs and IBM's watsonx platform.