Hyderabad–Dubai-based airline Flydubai on Monday signed an agreement for setting up an Aviation Co-Innovation Lab at International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad.

The agreement was signed by Flydubai’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) Ramesh Venkat and IIIT Hyderabad’s Director P.J. Narayanan.

Flydubai’s domain experts and engineers will work together with faculty and researchers of IIIT-Hyderabad, where the latter will provide deeptech inputs in the areas of data mining and extraction, natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

This will enable research from labs to come closer to addressing real world problems that the industry is facing, the airline said in a statement.

The announcement was made alongside Flydubai’s Air Travel BotHack, which was organised in partnership with Hyderabad-based tech start-up HackMania.

Aviation Co-Innovation Lab will also see prototyping of new technologies from start-up ecosystem.

The winner of the BotHack, Team Bot Alina, will receive mentorship to incubate their ideas, an internship at Flydubai’s Develoment Centre in India (IDC) in Hyderabad and tickets from Flydubai.

Flydubai currently operates 5 flights a week to Hyderabad from Dubai in addition to flights to seven more destinations in India – Ahmedabad, Chennai, Delhi, Kochi, Lucknow, Mumbai and Thiruvananthapuram. (IANS)