Ericsson announced that it has signed an MoU with ISI for three years whereby Ericsson Research plans to support and collaborate  with ISI in multiple research activities to be carried out under the Cyber-Physical Systems (C-CPS) umbrella. A collaborative research Centre for Cyber-Physical Systems (C-CPS) between Ericsson Research and Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) has been set up in the first week of February 2024.

C-CPS is a virtual interdisciplinary research centre set up to foster both fundamental and applied research in Sustainable and Trustworthy Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) with immediate impact in deploying AI and CPS in the Indian ecosystem.

Speaking at the event for the Signing Ceremony, Chief Guest, Prof. Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, Director ISI Kolkata, said, “Research on safe and reliable CPS is expected to produce the necessary technologies for the next-generation autonomy. ISI has a congenial ecosystem for collaborative translational research that has always focussed on the needs of future technologies. 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.”

Elaborating on the partnership between Indian Statistical Institute and Ericsson, Dr Magnus Frodigh, Head of Ericsson Research, states, “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”. Dr Frodigh also presented Ericsson’s vision on 6G which aims to blend the physical and digital worlds enabling us to improve the quality of life by incorporating widespread Sensor-based communications between humans and machines through digital twins.

Nitin Bansal, Managing Director of Ericsson India states, “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”.

Speaking about the program, Prof. Diganta Mukherjee, Chairperson of the Cell for Cooperation with Academia, Industry and Research Labs (C-CAIR), ISI remarked, “Industry academia partnership is the future of R&D. We are very happy to partner with the technology giant Ericsson in research collaborations. 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.”

A series of talks and deliberations was organized to celebrate the occasion, where leaders from Ericsson Research and ISI participated to discuss the developments and advancements of current research plans and further collaborative research prospects between ISI and Ericsson. Some of the topics of discussion included next generation and energy efficient AI for CPS ready deployment at the network edge, fundamental challenges in 5G and beyond network research, quantum machine learning and secure communication.