"I want to build something that will not only benefit students, but will also benefit their children," said Ananda Narayan, a U-M doctoral student studying reinforcement learning. "This is the future and it is happening here at the University of Michigan."
Project Sapphire is another step forward in IBM's history of innovation in conversational systems. Most recently, IBM added its latest dialog management capabilities to its Watson platform, which is accessible to a community of 77,000 startups and innovators in established businesses who are tapping these capabilities in the form of API services to pilot, test and deploy new products and applications that can converse with users.
U-M and IBM have a history of collaboration. IBM has assisted with cognitive computing courses, worked with the university to discover new ways to apply Watson, and enabled the U-M Solar Car Team to use cognitive solar forecasting technology to predict solar radiation and cloud movement during the 2015 World Solar Challenge.
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