Microsoft Corp. is forming a new cross-continent research initiative to advance artificial intelligence technology.

The company on Thursday announced the establishment of the Cortana Intelligence Institute, a collaboration with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology focused on broadening the capabilities of its virtual assistant. RMIT, as the university is most commonly known, is Australia’s largest by enrollment. Researchers from the school will work with Microsoft personnel to apply AI to new tasks that currently can’t be handled by neural networks.

On the technology giant’s side, meanwhile, the initiative is set to include the participation of not one but two separate groups. The first is the 1,000-strong Microsoft Research division, while the other is Cortana Research, a much newer team focused specifically on virtual assistant technology.

One of the first items on the agenda is to assemble a “multidimensional” user dataset for development purposes. According to Microsoft, the goal is to gather a wide variety of information ranging from online activity patterns to location. The company is looking to build new AI models that can understand contextual data well enough to interpret and carry out complex user requests involving multiple different steps.

Microsoft said that the RMIT team assigned to the project will place a particular emphasis on automating work-related tasks. In other words, the company looks to apply the fruits of the Cortana Intelligence Institute’s efforts in the enterprise. This is an area that Amazon.com Inc. is targeting as well with Alexa, which enjoys much broader adoption than Cortana.

Microsoft presumably hopes that investing in basic research could yield new ways of closing the gap with the retail giant. But the company has a long way to go. In December, Amazon.com Inc. revealed that it has sold “tens of millions” of Alexa-enabled devices during the holiday season alone. 

Then there’s the fact that voice assistants such as Cortana can currently handle only basic tasks such as providing weather updates and playing music. For Microsoft’s vision of multistep automation workflows to be realized, the new Cortana Intelligence Institute will have to make some significant advancements.

Other contenders in the AI arms race are also looking to academia for help with their research efforts. Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind division, for example, last year opened a machine learning lab in Edmonton and appointed three professors from the University of Alberta to lead development initiatives. Microsoft established a Canadian AI center too in 2017 to draw on the local talent pool.

Image: Microsoft