• AI Journey participants to discuss steps towards implementation of National AI Development Strategy adopted by decree Russian President issued
• Results of international online competition attempting to approach creation of Artificial General Intelligence to be unveiled on first day of conference

November 7, 2019, Moscow - Artificial Intelligence Journey (AIJ), the largest AI forum in Eastern Europe backed by Sberbank and other leading companies, is launching in Moscow tomorrow, on November 8.

During the first day of the conference, or Science Day, speakers will share their research results across a number of AI areas at sessions on Artificial General Intelligence, computer vision, speech analytics & speech techs, natural language processing, recommender systems, AI philosophy and methodology, and new machine learning methods (AutoML and MetaML).

Reports will be delivered by Jürgen Schmidhuber, Scientific Director of Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, professor at Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, one of the creators behind LSTM neural networks; Bryan Catanzaro, Vice President of applied deep learning research with NVIDIA; Ben Goertzel, CEO and chief researcher of SingularityNET, leading world expert in artificial general intelligence, author of 20 science books and 140+ science articles; Andrey Kurpatov, Head of Neuroscience and Human Behavior Lab of Sberbank; and other speakers representing the largest international and Russian companies.

The second day of the forum, or Business Day, will be dedicated to the practical use of scientific developments in a variety of business areas and public life. Discussions will be held during the following sessions: AI and Smart Cities, AI and Retail, AI and Industry, AI and Ethics, AI and Telecoms, AI and Financial Sector, AI and Health Care, and Trends for AI Development. Also scheduled is a panel discussion on AI and Insurance.

Business Day speakers will include Bill Poucher, ACM Fellow Professor of Computer Science, Baylor University, and Executive Director of ACM International Collegiate Programming; Alexander Kraynov, Head of Machine Leaning and AI Lab of Yandex, who oversees AI experimental products and technologies; and other experts.

Adopted by a decree issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin, theNational AI Development Strategy aims at bringing prosperity, improving the quality of life for the people of Russia, and enhancing the nation's technology leadership dramatically. Sberbank actively participated in designing the national strategy and is set to work towards its successful implementation along with the country's government and partner companies. The AI Journey forum on November 8 and 9, 2019 will address the steps that need to be taken to implement the national strategy.

In addition to the conference, the AI Journey program included an online AI competition. Its participants tried to create an algorithm capable of passing an exam test by using information from open sources. The goal of this challenge, which was open to solo contenders and teams, was to approach the creation of Artificial General Intelligence that would be at the same level with humans and could solve multiple tasks. The competition results will be unveiled on November 8, the first day of the conference.

The AI Journey forum is a new venue to exchange opinions and update stakeholders on AI and its use both in and outside Russia. AI Journey is a descendant of Sberbank Data Science Journey (SDSJ), which had been held for three years, enjoyed success and proved that researchers and businesses really needed an even bigger venue to address Data Science and AI issues. On top of that, AI Journey is holding local conferences on machine learning, data science, and AI in seven cities of Russia - Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Ekaterinburg, Kazan, Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg, and Vladivostok - in October-December 2019.