The first Digital Centaur AI bootcamp, which ended in early August, featured 2,104 students from schools and universities. The online program was designed primarily to prepare participants for the Artificial Intelligence International Junior Contest (AIIJC), but the free course was available to anyone interested.

The bootcamp was the largest intensive course on AI for schoolchildren in Russia.

The intensive course was organized by Sberbank Charitable Foundation Investment to the Future's AI Academy for schoolchildren and the NTI Circle Movement's Practices of the Future project.

There were two parts to the course. From July 19 to 26, beginner-level participants studied basic machine learning tools and learned to program using Python. More advanced classes on neural networks, recommendation systems, and computer vision tasks were held from July 28 to August 4.

Participants who successfully completed all the webinars and assigned homework were presented with certificates. Over 250 bootcamp students received certificates.

A special theme of the course was digital centaurs, or systems based on human-AI collaboration that solve tasks better than humans or AI would separately. Some participants began working on creating centaurs during the bootcamp. This work will be continued as part of the NTI Circle Movement's Practices of the Future project.

A number of bootcamp participants will try their hand at Sber and the AI Alliance's Artificial Intelligence International Junior Contest, which has a prize fund of over RUB 10 mn. They will have to develop solutions in one of the 10 most relevant areas of AI application, from driverless transport to creative industries. Registration and qualification tasks are available until September 22, 2021.

Despite it being the height of the summer holidays, more than 2,100 children from around the country spent between 15-19 hours each solving challenging machine learning and data analysis problems. Such a high level of involvement on the part of the bootcamp participants shows that we have succeeded in bringing together an entire community of talented youth around the bootcamp and - more broadly - around the Artificial Intelligence International JuniorContest. I am certain that they will find the knowledge they obtained during the intensive course useful not just for the competition, but also for the further evolution of their skills and the development of breakthrough digital solutions.

Alexander Vedyakhin

First Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board, Sberbank

In order to design technology systems along the lines of digital centaurs, a specialist should first and foremost have mastered AI tools. Over the course of two weeks, the bootcamp participants went from the basics of Python to neural network training, matrix decomposition, and recommendation systems. In a short period of time, school and university students were provided with a basic toolkit that means they can already begin creating digital centaurs for games, medicine, emergency responses, etc. together with the like-minded people from the NTI Circle Movement's Practices of the Future project.

Dmitry Zemtsov

Head of the NTI Circle Movement working group

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Sberbank of Russia published this content on 18 August 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 18 August 2021 12:43:04 UTC.