Leading Chinese language Internet search provider Baidu has signed an agreement to establish a joint laboratory with the Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R), a research institute of the Agency for Science,Technology and Research (A*STAR).

The laboratory, which will be named Baidu-I²R Research Centre (BIRC), will operate as an R&D unit in I²R at Fusionopolis in Singapore. It will concentrate on areas such as Southeast Asian Language Resources, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and Information Extraction, Speech Information Processing and Multimedia Processing.

The joint-laboratory agreement was signed by Ms Wang Mengqiu, Vice President of Baidu, and Dr Tan Geok Leng, Acting Executive Director of I²R, in Beijing on 23 February 2012. “Baidu has some of the world’s leading search core technology, and I²R is very excited about establishing BIRC together with such a strong technology partner,” said Dr Tan. “We hope that the innovative achievements this partnership yields will enable us to fulfill the constantly evolving needs of netizens from different regions.”

I²R’s natural language processing technology allows users to input their native language into the search engine and Baidu’s “Box Computing” will be able to return precise results to the user. BIRC will focus on the Vietnamese and Thai languages in the initial phase of its research.

The launch of BIRC marks an important step in Baidu’s commitment to enhance its products in Southeast Asia. “Our overlap and complementary expertise in our research areas make us perfect partners,” said Ms Wang.

“Our knowledge of Chinese allows us to deliver the best possible user experience to our Chinese users and was fundamental to winning the market. Now, together with I²R we are laying the foundations to deliver an equally good user experience to users in other markets."