In a long-term agreement, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, collaborated with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) today, Wednesday, March 6, to conduct joint research on blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology.

The collaboration will also propel further innovation through the establishment of the NPCI-IISc Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Deep Tech Research & Development.

The partnership will focus on scalable blockchain platforms and multi-modal analytics over fintech data, NPCI said in a statement.

Faculty members from five departments at IISc will work with NPCI researchers on practical challenges related to these areas, it added.

Prof Navakanta Bhat, Dean, Division of Interdisciplinary Sciences, IISc, said, "We are delighted to partner with NPCI in the emerging areas of deep tech and fintech analytics. This partnership will not only foster cutting-edge research and the development of models and software prototypes, but also nurture professional development through workshops and training programmes. We look forward to the exciting outcomes that will emerge from this new Centre of Excellence."

NPCI's collaboration with the reputed institute is aimed at solving complex technological and engineering problem statements in the areas of scalability, privacy-preserving designs, neural networks, Graph AI, Large Language Models (LLM), and so on, the statement added.