Swedish telecom kit vendor Ericsson has signed a three-year memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Indian Statistical Institute, under which, Ericsson Research will support and collaborate with the institute for research activities under the Cyber-Physical Systems (C-CPS) umbrella.

To this extent, a research centre for C-CPS between Ericsson Research and the Indian Statistical Institute has also been set up in the first week of February, the company said in a press statement.

The virtual interdisciplinary research centre is aimed at fostering both fundamental and applied research in sustainable and trustworthy Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) with immediate impact in deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and CPS in the Indian ecosystem.

“Research on safe and reliable CPS is expected to produce the necessary technologies for the next-generation autonomy…The institute wholeheartedly welcomes the collaborative ISI-Ericsson research centre and is happy to partner with Ericsson in this journey towards CPS realization in the age of AI and 6G,” said Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, Director of ISI Kolkata.

“This collaboration strengthens our R&D commitments in India and is pivotal to Compute and AI research. We are excited to partner with ISI and look forward to collaborative research in fundamental areas as well as translational research for our Future Network Platforms,” said Magnus Frodigh, Head of Ericsson Research.

At the pact signing ceremony, Frodigh also presented Ericsson’s vision on 6G which aims to blend the physical and digital worlds to improve the quality of life by incorporating widespread sensor-based communications between humans and machines through digital twins.

“Ericsson has a strong focus on R&D and we believe our research partnerships in AI and 6G with academic institutions will enable us to build a strong foundation for the country’s 6G program. We are the leaders in 5G and our research initiatives are geared to provide affordable network platforms for ubiquitous connectivity all across the country,” said Nitin Bansal, Managing Director of Ericsson India.

“We hope that this MoU will lead to further opportunities for working together in the Data Science and Machine Learning domain applied to 6G telecommunication as well as classical and quantum secure communication,” said Diganta Mukherjee, Chairperson of the Cell for Cooperation with Academia, Industry and Research Labs (C-CAIR), ISI.