Tatyana Gavrilova, Professor, Head of the Department of Information Technologies in Management, Graduate School of Management, St. Petersburg University (GSOM SPbU), provided a lecture and a workshop at the Summer School of the Russian Association of Artificial Intelligence (RAAI Summer School) organized at the Sirius Scientific-Technological University.

The lecture Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent  Systems and Technologies today and tomorrow was devoted to the review of the history and current state of world research in the field of artificial intelligence in Russia and abroad. The emphasis was on debunking myths and objectively discussing the strengths and weaknesses of models and methods for developing intelligent systems, from neural networks to knowledge engineering.

Tatiana Gavrilova shared her impressions of her participation in the Summer School. She said: “I really liked the audience; it was interesting and literate. The master-class  on visual-analytical thinking was especially lively, when the participants created mental models, first individually, and then in pairs. They became convinced that understanding is one thing, but explaining their knowledge visually and systematically is another one".

It is already the sixth summer school organized by RAAI, the largest in the field of artificial intelligence public academic organization of Russia and CIS. The purpose of the educational module is to acquaint students with modern fundamental methods of artificial intelligence and its applications from an interdisciplinary perspective, to present examples of practical problems requiring new methods and algorithms, and to involve students in research activities.

This year, the Business School presents 6 directions:

• modern methods of reinforcement learning;
• planning behavior in robotics;
• logics in artificial intelligence;
• deep learning in computer vision;
• neural network analysis of natural language;
• neuromorphic computing.

Lectures and practical seminars are held in each area; 30 teachers from leading universities of the country participate in the work. The school includes work in teams of 4-5 people on projects.

More than 100 senior Bachelor, Master and Doctoral Programs students were selected on a competitive basis (mandatory testing, if available, academic works were taken into account).

Tuition is free of charge, it takes place on July 5-18 at the educational center of the Scientific and Technical University Sirius in Sochi, which was created on the basis of the Olympic infrastructure. Part of the lectures are broadcast online.