December 16, 2019, Moscow — A series of AI and data science events Artificial Intelligence Journey or AI Journey sponsored by Sberbank and other leading companies has been finished. Held from September to December, AI Journey included an international online competition, a conference in Moscow and a series of regional conferences that brought together about 9,000 people. AIJ made it in top five DS&AI events for the number of participants along with such international conferences as NeurIPS, ICML, etc.
The international AI Journey competition that was held from September 4 to November 1 brought together 98 teams and more than 350 data scientists from 49 cities and 14 countries across the world, in particular China, Germany, India, France, etc. The main objective of the event was to approach the creation of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, and algorithms capable of learning and passing exam tests of different complexity. More than 2,300 solutions were offered. The winning team with the algorithm that got 63 points (B student level) received RUB 1 mln. The total prize pool amounted at RUB 3 mln.
The AI Journey international conference in Moscow brought together more than 5,000 participants, not only data scientists, but also business people, government officials and academics. About 150 speakers from 55 organizations and seven countries took part in the event that was held on November 8 and 9 at Moscow’s Expocentre. A speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the signing of an agreement on AI Alliance creation were among the highlights of the conference.
At AI Journey, seven Russian cities such as Vladivostok, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Kaliningrad, and Saint Petersburg hosted regional conferences on machine learning, data science and AI from October to December The events were supported by partner institutions and universities. The regional conferences brought together about 100 speakers from 30 companies, including Sberbank, Yandex, SingularityNET, Mail.ru Group, Gazprom Neft, Huawei, SkolTech and others. The conferences enjoyed great interest in AI technology both among professionals from different business areas, and students and future high school graduates. About 4,000 people attended the regional conferences.
In 2020, the organizers plan to scale up the event by extending its geography and increasing the number of participants.
