Maxim Reshetnikov, the minister of economic development of Russia, chaired a meeting at ITMO University attended by directors of six artificial intelligence research centers. They have been created under the government’s instruction and are part of leading universities and research organizations — Skoltech, HSE University, ITMO University, Innopolis University, Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of RAS, and MIPT. The minister praised the centers’ achievements, calling for a new framework to advance basic AI research and facilitate countrywide industrial implementation of AI solutions.

“The six AI centers have laid the groundwork for addressing the most pressing challenges of the technology transformation. The fact that they attracted 2.5 billion rubles in private investment on top of the four-year government funding of 5.4 billion rubles points to their remarkable performance. The centers have proved to be economically viable projects,” Reshetnikov noted.

Speaking about applications created by the centers, the minister mentioned the pilot version of the solution aimed at reducing exploration and drilling costs, as well as oil recovery increase. The head of Skoltech Applied AI, Professor Evgeny Burnaev, presented the center’s basic research aiming to create new AI algorithms that will help consolidate multimodal spatiotemporal data, combine physical and machine learning models, and reduce training time and computational costs by compressing large neural networks and accelerating their training. Skoltech uses these libraries and frameworks enhanced with appropriate computing modules for the subject domains in question to create basic AI software tools. These tools aid in solving applied research tasks and in developing software applications for service provision. They also support decision-making in the context of territory and enterprise development.

“By extending funding for existing centers in leading universities, the Ministry of Economic Development enables us to provide platforms and end-to-end solutions, currently in pilot testing and implementation, to end users across Russia,” Burnaev said. “In 2024, Skoltech will complete a multiscale monitoring and risk management platform prototype, which will help Russian regions and industrial enterprises deal with sustainable development tasks. Next year, we expect to begin the commercial operation of several platform services, including Forecasting of Emergencies and their Consequences, Forecasting of Ice Conditions, and the Self-Learning Reservoir Model.”