The Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT Delhi) and Flipkart today signed an agreement as part of Flipkart’s ongoing industry-academic alliance initiatives. As a part of this partnership, Flipkart will offer research grants and market insights to the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT) - IIT Delhi’s industry interface organisation - to generate granular, data-backed segments of users linked to different e-commerce categories based on shopping behaviour, demographics, surrounding users’ behaviour, etc. On the technical front, the collaborative effort will help in developing a general purpose user activity graph that could be harnessed for different use cases leveraging state-of-the-art GNN (graph neural network) based techniques, an official statement said. The research aims to address the limitation of existing persona creation tools and to learn from a user activity graph that encompasses information about the various personas associated with each user. Flipkart has been nurturing academic alliances to build an ecosystem of learning and development through industry-focused research to address critical industry problems. Flipkart and FITT will also jointly undertake a number of other initiatives that include organising seminars, offering conference travel grants and engaging in company-sponsored research to support a project on a topic of mutual interest between Flipkart and the researchers from IIT Delhi. This research partnership aims to enhance personalised recommendations by incorporating user personas. In addition to persona-fortified product recommendations, this collaboration is poised to have a far-reaching impact by advancing machine learning models capable of handling large-scale real-world data effectively. Over the last two years, Flipkart signed up five projects across IIT Delhi, Bombay, and IISc.
