National Institute of Technology (NIT) Andhra Pradesh has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with LinkedIn, an online platform for business and employment, to encourage collaborative research in different domains and nurture talents in the field of Cloud Computing and Machine Learning, the institute stated in a press communique recently.
The MoU was signed by the director of NIT Andhra Pradesh, C. S. P. Rao and director, Business Systems Programme of LinkedIn, Naga Krishna R Sathvalli. Chidambaran Kollengode, director, Data and AI Platforms division of LinkedIn spearheaded this research collaboration on behalf of his organisation.
“This association will enable joint research in the niche area of intelligent cloud computing and foster research to address industry-relevant problems by the academia,” said Rao.
Under this MoU, a research grant will be awarded to the principal investigator, Karthick Seshadri, an assistant professor at NIT Andhra Pradesh and co-investigator Nagesh Bhattu Sristy, also an assistant professor at the institute, for solving open research problems in enabling intelligent and elastic cloud computing.
This is the second of its kind MoU between NIT Andhra Pradesh and LinkedIn. The fresh collaboration was possible due to the results achieved by researchers from the institute after the first MoU signed in June 2020, the institute stated.
“As an outcome of the first MoU with LinkedIn, we have set up a cloud computing test-bed using the servers sponsored through funding by LinkedIn to run experiments at NIT Andhra Pradesh premises,” said Seshadri.
He thanked the institute’s director for his continuous encouragement and support in enabling researchers to execute high-quality and impactful research.
Chidambaran Kollengode, director, Data and AI Platforms division of LinkedIn, said, “To address the problem of scaling, there is a need for an efficient workload characterisation model. This collaboration has been very promising and fruitful in our steps to realise a truly elastic cloud.”
The researchers of NIT Andhra Pradesh and Kollengode have also devised an ‘Unsupervised model for profiling the workloads arriving at the data center and a supervised ensemble model for prediction of resource demands on cloud.’
The findings of this research work were accepted for publication in ‘Advances in Data Computing, Communication and Security,’ a Journal by Springer.