The Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT) and Flipkart have entered into an agreement on 20th March, 2024 as part of Flipkart’s ongoing efforts to foster collaboration between industry and academia.
Under this partnership, Flipkart will provide research grants and valuable market insights to the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), which serves as IIT Delhi’s interface with industry. The aim is to analyze detailed segments of e-commerce users based on various factors such as shopping habits, demographics, and the behavior of surrounding users.
Furthermore, this collaboration will focus on developing a versatile user activity graph using cutting-edge GNN (graph neural network) techniques, catering to a variety of applications.
The research aims to overcome the limitations of current persona creation tools by leveraging insights from a comprehensive user activity graph that encompasses data on different personas linked to each user.
Flipkart is actively fostering academic partnerships to cultivate a learning environment and promote industry-oriented research to tackle pressing industry challenges. Additionally, Flipkart and FITT will collaborate on various initiatives, including hosting seminars, providing grants for conference travel, and participating in company-sponsored research projects focused on topics of mutual interest to Flipkart and researchers from IIT Delhi.
This research collaboration seeks to improve personalized recommendations by integrating user personas. Besides updating product recommendations based on personas, this partnership is set to make significant strides in enhancing machine learning models adept at managing extensive real-world data efficiently.
In the past two years, Flipkart has initiated five projects in collaboration with IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, and IISc.