The research laboratory, located at ITB’s School of Electronics and Informatics building, is expected to serve as a research center on AI and cloud computing for students, lecturers and researchers.

Bukalapak founder and CEO Achmad Zaky said the center would not only provide facilities such as servers for research purposes but also knowledge transfer with the help of 200 engineers from its main research center -- Bukalapak Research and Development.

"Our challenge now is to discover talents in the field of technology and AI who can contribute to Indonesia," Zaky said, citing the lack of AI experts in the country.

The center will also provide data related to the platform's hundreds of millions of products, said Bukalapak public relations manager Evi Andarini, ensuring that its users' privacy would be protected.

“Even a sample of less than 0.1 percent of our petabyte-scale data warehouse will consist of a mountain of valuable data that we hope can accelerate AI research in Indonesia on areas such as natural language understanding, computer vision and deep learning,” Evi told The Jakarta Post.

Research, Technology and Higher Education Minister M. Nasir expressed the hope that the collaboration could produce positive impacts on the country's economy.

"The ministry will help with the funding for the research on the upstream side, while the users are in charge of the downstream," he said. (ars/bbn)

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