National Institute of Technology Andhra Pradesh (NIT AP), Tadepalligudem, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with LinkedIn, the online platform that connects professionals of the world, on Tuesday, January 25. This is to ensure collaborative research and development between the two.

Prof CSP Rao, Director, NIT AP and Naga Krishna R Sathvalli, Director, Business Systems Programme, LinkedIn signed the MoU and on behalf of LinkedIn, this research collaboration will be spearheaded by Chidambaran Kollengode, Director, Data and AI Platforms division of LinkedIn.

As per the MoU, a research grant will be awarded to principal investigator Dr Karthick Seshadri, Assistant Professor, NIT AP and the co-investigator Dr Nagesh Bhattu Sristy, Assistant Professor, NIT AP so that they can work on solving open research problems in enabling intelligent and elastic cloud computing.

To nurture a talent pool with a niche skillset in cloud computing along with domains like ML and statistical modeling for data analytics; to produce a PhD student out of the project who will have skillsets to work on and solve contemporary problems in distributed systems engineering and computing; to publish research articles in impact journals and to spark a culture of organising faculty development programmes (FDPs) on cloud computing — these are few of the objectives of the MoU. 

Dr Karthick Seshadri, Assistant Professor, NIT AP, shared that, “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 the experiments at NIT Andhra Pradesh premises."