Adobe Doubles Down On Academia To Get Smart About AI And Algos AdExchanger

Adobe is pursuing a different tack: dishing out $50,000 no-strings-attached grants to professors and doctoral students working on projects of joint interest. "What academia provides is more the advanced mathematical algorithms and the advanced research that's gone into other related areas but hasn't been applied to our field," said Anil Kamath, Adobe's VP of technology. Adobe was not an early promoter of AI products as were other major technology players, like Google with its Automated Insights pattern-recognition tool, IBM with Watson and Einstein from Salesforce. But Adobe's research grant program, which has dished out 40 grants for a total of $2 million in the past four years, is bringing algorithmic AI into the company through academic work. Adobe is also doing outreach at events.