Dmitry Peskov presented NTI results 2021
On December 8, the Arguments and Facts Publishing House held a press conference of Dmitry Peskov, Head of Young Professionals Direction and Special Envoy of the President of Russia for Digital and Technological Development. At the event, he answered to the questions about the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in Russia, advanced technologies in medicine, education and communications infrastructure.
When presenting National Technology Initiative (NTI) results 2021, Dmitry Peskov noted the Russian Scientific and Technological Congress “Directions to the National Technological Breakthrough 2030. Foresight of the Century”, which took place on December 2 with the participation of ASI and RAS. The ASI-RAS cooperation is driven by the need to link fundamental research they run with fundamental technologies of Russian companies and the creation of new competence centers, Peskov said. Such centers already exist in many academic institutions, for example, at the Samara State Medical University, which launched Russia’s first medical Boiling Point in late November.
Dmitry Peskov also spoke about successful projects that won the Technological Breakthrough 2020 Award, including a fuel cell bus, a plant producing hydrogen fuel cells for drones, the Kama electric car, the first Russian hydrogen fueling station and 5G base station. The latter is created by the NTI competence center at Skoltech, which has already conducted research on 6G technology. Dmitry Peskov said that, in terms of testing, it is now better to invest in 6G rather than 5G, since this very technology will be globally applied in the next few dozen years.
According to Mr. Peskov, key challenge of the present days is to make the healthcare system reliable and flexible. One of the NTI’s objectives in the past three years was creation of healthcare AI to make the doctors’ labor easier, render the diagnostic process more accurate and ensure high-quality remote patient monitoring. The same issues are also touched upon by ASI’s National Social Initiative (NSI).
“The NSI methodology is simple; we review, digitize and scale up the best regional practices. And since the gap from getting appointment to making a diagnosis is big, there is a non-obvious effect for millions of people, when nothing seems to be changed, but procedures have become better and faster, the health of people improves and the life expectancy increases. We are trying to add to it a technological basis as well” mentioned Peskov.
Russia is implementing the federal project for Artificial Intelligence, which focuses on AI introduction in medicine, education, business practices, and unmanned technologies, he said. In addition, development programs in the radio electronic industry are aimed at creating neuromorphic chips intended to address AI issues. In turn, NTI holds two technology-related competitions for developing AI-based teaching and medical assistants, which will check homework and analyze CT images or medical records to make a diagnosis. The competitions bring together AI leaders, such as Nanosemantics, iPavlov, and Anti-Plagiarism.
Answering the question of how to close the gap between schools and universities, Peskov mentioned the example of the NTI Club Movement. “High school and first-year students should be engaged in the same activities in line with the same approaches and, preferably, in the same team. Our National Technology Contest joins a few hundred thousand participants and dozens of thousands of graduates who have entered top 100 universities and gained additional points for admission, while many leading universities, such as FEFU, ITMO University and Innopolis, enroll entire teams of graduates. The finalists now include regional teams from Yakutia and Veliky Novgorod rather than those of the best schools in Moscow or St. Petersburg,” Peskov said.
Dmitry Peskov has also mentioned the Atlas of Emerging Jobs; its last edition was presented at the end of 2019. The Atlas was developed by ASI together with WorldSkills Russia, Mail.Ru Group and Alpina Publishing House. According to Dmitry Peskov, the country runs two national vocational retraining programs, including a program based on WorldSkills Russia and the Digital Professions project at the University 2035. Last year, several dozens of thousands of people took part in these programs, with more than 600,000 retraining certificates and qualifications issued.