SINGAPORE - Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) jointly launched a research institute on Wednesday by signing a Memorandum of Understanding.

It is Alibaba's first joint research institute outside China, with a pool of 50 researchers from both organizations.

The institute will seek to combine NTU's human-centered Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology which has been applied to areas such as health, homes and communities, with Alibaba's leading technologies including Natural Language Processing, computer vision, machine learning and cloud computing, to explore further technology breakthroughs and real-life AI solutions.

Alibaba Group Chief Technology Officer Zhang Jianfeng said at the ceremony that Singapore is an important market for Alibaba, as it is the company's regional base in Southeast Asia that provides e-commerce, cloud computing and payment solutions to empower customers in various industries in the region from the city-state.

He said the company, by launching its first joint research institute in Singapore, hope to work with talents in Singapore and researchers worldwide to explore technology innovation that can address common issues faced by the society at large.

"Meanwhile, we can also tap into our existing business resources in the region to magnify the impact of the technology development, making solutions affordable and accessible to all," Zhang added.

Subra Suresh, the university president, said the combination of strengths of Alibaba's AI technologies with NTU's Humanized AI technologies will create smarter, healthier and happier cities for people of all ages.

"These AI and cloud technologies will be developed and tested on the NTU Smart Campus to demonstrate the effectiveness of the solutions so that our partners can have confidence before taking them to the market in Singapore and rest of the world," he said.