Infosys Technologies, the IT services and consulting company and the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) signed an agreement to undertake joint research. Under this agreement, Infosys will sponsor research in unstructured data analytics, inference and diagnostics tools and the development of next-generation business intelligence tools at IIIT-H. The agreement was signed by Prof. Rajeev Sangal, Director – IIIT Hyderabad and Subu Goparaju, VP and Head, SETLabs, Infosys Technologies.

"Academia and industry can work together to take research from laboratory to industry. Such collaborations have the seeds to produce innovative new products, which the industry can develop further and commercialize,” said Sangal. “Thus the Indian IT industry can move higher up the value chain. The current collaboration between Infosys and IIIT-H's Centre for Data Engineering is a step in this direction."

The objective of this collaboration is to improve the functionality provided in Health Information Management Infrastructure (HIMI) solutions. The research will focus on building region-based feature selection algorithms for images to enhance image search and retrieval, integrating radiology report (free-form text) mining functionality into HIMI, integrating with diagnostic framework for downstream processing and categorizing and reorganizing articulated knowledge for efficient knowledge exploration.

”IIIT Hyderabad is one of India’s premier technology institutes,” said Goparaju. “Their focus on research in information management areas is synchronous with our interests in the area. Through this collaboration, we hope to develop innovative technology solutions to address real-life issues.”

This agreement is part of a larger Infosys program to engage with leading Indian and international universities to facilitate research in a variety of areas including software engineering, information management, knowledge engineering, game theory, and IP lifecycle management.

The company has been collaborating with academic institutions with its global internship program InStep and its industry academia program Campus Connect. It has also been hiring university graduates in the US and the UK. After a comprehensive training regime in India, these employees return to their countries to work on client projects.