Japanese company Fujitsu has set up a research centre in India to focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning technologies, as well as quantum software.

The centre in Bangalore has been named FRIPL, for Fujitsu Research of India Private Limited, and represents the latest addition to Fujitsu’s global R&D network.

As one of its first initiatives, FRIPL will embark on joint research with the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad and the Indian Institute of Science to promote innovation in AI technologies. The joint research activities will initially focus on improving the accuracy and resilience of AI and machine-learning technology.

R&D with the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad will focus on AI technology to discover causal relationships with higher accuracy, while collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science will centre on technology to generate AI automatically through autonomous training in response to various environmental changes.

“Innovation has a growing role to play in solving societal and environmental challenges,” said Vivek Mahajan, chief technology officer at Fujitsu. “As one of the world’s leading technology companies, Fujitsu plays a key role in driving innovation, and we will harness technologies like AI and quantum to contribute to these issues. These efforts require access to top talent. Strengthening our presence in India will allow us to tap into the enormous potential offered by world class researchers with local institutions and universities that drive global software technology development. We look forward to conducting more agile and challenging joint research together to deliver a more sustainable future for humanity.”

Fujitsu has established FRIPL as a research centre focusing on AI and quantum software to enhance software technologies essential for R&D in key technology areas. Fujitsu will continue to hire talent in this field in India and aims to boost the number of its researchers to 50 by 2024. Moving forward, the company plans to expand its research fields into security and other areas and conduct software R&D in collaboration with Fujitsu’s wider global network of research centres in Japan, Europe and the USA with the aim of creating software for global distribution.

Fujitsu will collaborate with the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad on research into AI technology to discover causal relationships with higher accuracy. This technology combines the technology of Fujitsu’s AI for high-speed discovery of cause-and-effect relationships between large volumes of data with the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad’s expertise in geometric statistical theory. The technology will allow researchers to extract complicated causalities that could not be processed with existing technologies until now to discover causal relationships with high accuracy from a wide range of data. In this way, the researchers aim to provide an effective tool for innovative discovery and contribute to a wide range of fields including drug discovery and new material development.

Fujitsu will collaborate with the Indian Institute of Science on research into technology to generate AI automatically through autonomous learning in response to various changes. Within their joint research, the parties will leverage Fujitsu’s knowledge in adaptive machine learning – including reinforcement learning – and the Indian Institute of Science’s expertise and technology gained through research on deep learning with the aim to conduct R&D on an automatic deep learning model generation method that can make highly accurate predictions without trial-and-error intervention by experts.

In this way, Fujitsu and the Indian Institute of Science aim to contribute to the autonomous evolution of AI, with the aim of realising AI that can be applied in areas that require constant responses to environmental changes including automated operation of large-scale systems and management decision support to increase business KPIs.

Fujitsu is a Japanese information and communication technology company with about 126,000 employees in more than 100 countries. It reported consolidated revenues of ¥3.6tn for the year ending March 2021.