Flipkart, IIT Delhi to research on personas to boost personalised suggestions

New Delhi, March 19: E-commerce major Flipkart on Tuesday said that it signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), the industry interface organisation of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D) for joint research on personas to enhance personalised recommendations.

As part of the MoU, Flipkart will offer research grants and market insights to FITT to generate granular, data-backed segments of users linked to different e-commerce categories based on shopping behaviour, demographics, and others.

"Through our collaboration with IIT Delhi, we hope to find a data-driven solution that will enable us to understand our customer's requirements and preferences better thereby, allowing us to elevate the shopping experience by offering persona-based recommendations," Mayur Datar, Chief Data Scientist at Flipkart, said in a statement.

According to the company, the research aims to address the limitations of existing persona creation tools and to learn from a user activity graph that encompasses information about the various personas associated with each user.

"In addition to persona-fortified product recommendations, this collaboration is poised to have a far-reaching impact by advancing machine learning models capable of handling large-scale real-world data effectively," said Sayan Ranu, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi.

Flipkart and FITT will also jointly undertake several other initiatives that include organising seminars, offering conference travel grants and engaging in company-sponsored research to support a project on a topic of mutual interest between the e-commerce major and the researchers from IIT Delhi.