Commemorating the official opening of BIRC: (From left) Acting Executive Director of I 2 R Dr Tan Geok Leng, Vice President of Baidu Ms Wang Mengqiu, Chairman of A*STAR Mr Lim Chuan Poh, and Managing Director of A*STAR and Executive Director of the Science and Engineering Research Council Dr Raj Thampuran.

Leading Chinese language Internet search provider Baidu will adopt language and speech verification technologies from the Institute for Infocomm Research (I ² R) to enhance its search capabilities and support its globalisation strategy.

The licensing agreement with Exploit Technologies, the technology transfer arm of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), was signed during the official opening of the Baidu-I ² R Research Centre (BIRC) on 26 July. It covers I ² R’s Vietnamese and Thai language technologies and Speaker Verification technology, and marks an important milestone in the collaboration between I ² R and Baidu through BIRC.

The centre, which is already in operation, has a team of established researchers and engineers working on cutting-edge research on human language technology. It has charted a research roadmap for Southeast Asian Language Resources, Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and Information Extraction, and Speech Information Processing.

Among its research programmes is a project on Vietnamese and Thai Language Resources and Processing, which will help extend Baidu’s Web services into the Southeast Asian market by enabling more efficient Internet searches. These language technologies will also further strengthen Baidu’s leading position in semantic search using its Box Computing technology.

In the area of speaker verification, I ² R’s state-of-the-art technology is being enhanced by the BIRC team for Baidu Cloud, an integrated platform for mobile devices. I ² R is widely acknowledged as a technology leader in this space, having beaten 45 international institutions to top the United States’ National Institute of Standards and Technology Speaker Recognition Evaluation in 2008. With the collaboration, mobile phone owners using the Baidu Cloud mobile platform can now enjoy secure and personalised mobile services with I ² R’s Speaker Verification technology.

BIRC operates as an R&D unit on I ² R’s premises at Fusionopolis. Ms Wang Mengqiu, Baidu’s Vice President, said the centre’s official opening will further accelerate the cooperative efforts that were already underway. “The synergies between Baidu and I ² R are clear from the fruits already borne out by our cooperation. I ² R is an excellent partner that can help fulfill our mission of providing the best and most equitable way for people to find what they are looking for online,” she said.

Earlier this year, on 23 February, the joint-laboratory agreement between Baidu and I ² R was signed by Ms Wang and Dr Tan Geok Leng, Acting Executive Director of I ² R, in Beijing, China. Dr Tan described the collaboration as a “winning formula” that combines I ² R’s expertise in speech and language technologies with Baidu’s deep knowledge of market needs.

“We encourage global companies like Baidu to work in synergistic partnership with I ² R. This enables them to leverage on our talented researchers’ spectrum of relevant capabilities and competency to introduce cutting-edge and value-added technologies to the industry,” he said.