SINGAPORE – Green computing and artificial intelligence safety will be among the focus areas of a new AI research and innovation centre, which is expected to be set up at the NUS School of Computing by 2025.

The proposed centre, a collaboration between IBM and NUS, aims to accelerate scientific research here by tapping the American tech giant’s full-stack AI infrastructure.

Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo announced the new centre at the IBM Think 2024 event held at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre on Aug 15.

Mrs Teo described IBM as a longstanding partner of the Republic in the area of AI, with many of the firm’s efforts serving the public good.

This will mark the first time IBM’s full-stack AI infrastructure system – the entire spectrum of software and technology required to build, test, and deploy an application – is installed on a university campus in the Asia-Pacific region.

The AI-optimised computing infrastructure will operate on watsonx, a data and AI platform developed by IBM, as well as the company’s Red Hat hybrid cloud platform.

Government agencies and companies, as well as academic and research institutions, will be able to take advantage of the new centre to conduct cutting-edge AI research that can benefit people, NUS and IBM said in a statement.

“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,” they said.

The centre will take a sustainability-focused open innovation approach to developing AI technologies – incorporating ideas from both external and internal sources – which has greater potential to improve the quality and pace of adoption of new AI technologies, the two parties said.

They added that they hoped to work together to develop tools and methodologies to help build trust in AI.

“IBM and NUS share a common goal to enable innovations in AI and sustainable computing, and we look forward to furthering this collaboration,” said IBM Research hybrid cloud and AI platform vice-president Priya Nagpurkar.

Professor Liu Bin, NUS Deputy President for research and technology, said the university was “very excited” about the opportunity to collaborate with IBM.

“Building on the new NUS AI Research Institute announced ...