The Artificial Intelligence Alliance presented its first ranking of Russian university training for AI specialists. It included 180 universities fr om 64 regions with Bachelor's programs. In 2023, more than five thousand students were enrolled in this specialty.
The ranking assigned educational institutions into 12 groups from A+ (leaders) to E+ (beginners). The Higher School of Economics, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and ITMO University received the highest ratings. NSU was placed in the 5th C++ group together with the Russian Federation Government Financial Institute.
Alexey Okunev, Director of the NSU Institute of Intelligent Robotics and Candidate of Chemical Sciences, talked about AI at the University,
Today, almost all NSU educational programs contain certain elements of artificial intelligence. We now have a specialized undergraduate department to train AI specialists. In addition, almost all departments have targeted programs that specialize in the field of artificial intelligence, but with an emphasis on their specialty. For example, the Mechanics and Mathematics Department has both a Bachelor's degree related to AI and two Master's Programs in big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. The Information Technology Department has training programs on the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. The Physics Department offers courses in machine learning as part of their main program as well as advanced courses wh ere they train specialists in the field of physical computer science. The Humanities Institute has a specialty in natural language processing using artificial intelligence. The Economics Department teaches regression analysis.
NSU is one of the leading Russian educational and research centers in the field of artificial intelligence. The University is implementing a “Digital Future” strategic project, which received support from the “Priority 2030” program. As part of this project, work is underway to create autonomous agents with elements of AGI (artificial general intelligence). These include an autonomous industrial AI platform that is a universal complex for industrial video analytics. The platform is currently being tested at eight enterprises in the Novosibirsk Region. An Institute of Intelligent Robotics has been created at NSU and it will have its first graduates in 2024.
An important part of the “Digital Future” project is the creation of the Lavrentiev Supercomputer Center, which will be located on the grounds of a world-class campus being built as part of the national “Science and Universities” project. The Lavrentiev SCC will also become a center for collective use that will support solving problems related to applied engineering, mathematical modeling, artificial intelligence, and big data processing.
