Tech giants will allocate $110 million to American and Japanese universities for AI research

The US and Japanese governments have announced new academic partnerships in the field of artificial intelligence. Research projects will receive $110 million in funding from NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon and a number of Japanese firms, writes The Register.

According to the agreement, the University of Washington will merge with the University of Tsukuba, and Carnegie Mellon University — from Keio University in Tokyo. NVIDIA, Amazon, Arm, Softbank, Microsoft and nine other Japanese companies will provide $110 million in funding for these projects.

Carnegie Mellon University and Keio University will focus on research in the areas of:

• multimodal and multilingual learning;
• embedded AI or AI for robots;
• autonomous symbiosis of AI with humans;
• life sciences ;
• using AI for scientific discoveries.

The partnership between Washington and the University of Tsukuba will be effective thanks to the location of both educational institutions in science and technology centers — Seattle and Tsukubi, respectively. 

US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio < /b>Kishida  welcomed the creation of new partnerships in the field of artificial intelligence research. They reaffirmed their commitment to further advancing the Hiroshima Process on AI and strengthening cooperation between national AI security institutes.

These new partnerships are the third wave of university-corporate initiatives between US and Japanese companies to jointly invest in scientific and technological research initiated by Biden and Kishida.