o9 Solutions announced its collaboration with IIT Kharagpur and NITIE to drive R&D on AI-ML technologies. The o9-IITKGP-NITIE Program is a cohort-based research program with the common goal of creating high quality research papers in the field of AI-ML by using the o9 Platform, which will foster immediate adoption by the industry.
Dr. Narasimha Kamath (PhD, IIM Calcutta) Senior Vice President – R&D, o9 Solutions and Prof. Manoj Kumar Tiwari (FNAE, FNASc, FIIIE, FIISE, and FIETI) Director, National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE) will be guiding the entire collaboration.
o9 will host research projects in association with the various departments at IIT Kharagpur and NITIE. It will also provide students an opportunity to participate in research initiatives where they will be provided with real world complex/large datasets and would run new generation algorithms to improve forecasts, hence facilitating a better demand planning process. This collaboration aims to bring together a world class pool of expertise in both industry and academia, enabling students from IIT KGP to work on other next generation and cutting-edge technologies. o9 will provide research scholars with an access to the company’s SaaS platform, and software for the educational curriculum for skill development at these institutes too. As part of this relationship o9 will also provide exciting career opportunities to students from these prestigious universities.
“Sales forecasting is of utmost importance for inventory management to increase profit and reduce inventory holding and storage costs. There are many off-the-shelf forecasting algorithms available in the market. ‘Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting’ is a unique research project which incorporates feature functions of products in demand planning. The research students implemented and ran this Forecasting on o9 platform, and we are seeing very promising results on large customer datasets”, stated Dr. Narasimha, Senior Vice President – R&D, o9 Solutions.
“Due to the large number of commodities and the complexity of the market, understanding the sales behavior of the retail industry is very crucial. Hence finding the optimal inventory requires accurate modeling and forecasting of a retail company. Along with that the availability and relevance of historical data, selection of key factors, the time period to be forecast, degree of desirable accuracy and cost-benefit are crucial for market prediction. The main focus of this research collaboration is to apply advanced AI/ML techniques for better forecasting of sales,” said Rony Mitra, Research Scholar, Department of Mathematics, IIT Kharagpur.
“As organizations look to modernize and optimize processes, machine learning is an increasingly powerful tool to drive automation. This meaningful collaboration between o9 solutions and eminent academic institutions like IIT KGP and NITIE will foster innovation and growth in new technologies. As India ushers in the era of digitization, it is in the enviable position of having a young tech-savvy population ready to apply its learnings in key fields such as AI and Big Data to solve major challenges of different technological sectors. Premier institutions like IIT KGP and NITIE will engage young researchers to apprehend and solve practical industrial problems that will provide institutional knowledge about a given process. Such symbiotic relationship benefits society, stimulating a trained workforce providing today’s most pressing challenges and creating a technological advantage to improve industries gaining competitive advantage in the marketplace.” said Prof. Manoj Kumar Tiwari, Director, National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE).
o9 also collaborates with incubators at leading Indian universities to strengthen regional research and innovation ecosystems in AI / machine learning space and provides mentorship and capacity for building these next generation solutions. This partnership is part of o9’s social impact initiative and aligns with the sustainable development goal of “Partnership for Goals”.
