Artificial Intelligence Journey, Sber’s international three-day online conference on  artificial intelligence (AI), opens today, November 10. Held by Sber in collaboration with  top Russian and foreign technology companies over three days, the conference is one  of the key events of the Year of Science and Technology in Russia. 

The conference will be opened by Alexander Vedyakhin, first deputy chairman of the  Sberbank Executive Board, and Maxim Oreshkin, aide to the President of the Russian  Federation. The first day of the conference will be dedicated to the application of AI in  sustainable development for society, state, and business, as well as key issues on the  ESG agenda. 

Alexander Vedyakhin, first deputy chairman of the executive board, Sberbank: 

“Our conference, AI Journey, the foundations of which we laid in 2016, has quickly  evolved from a national event to a global one. Each year we raise the bar higher and  higher, striving to attract the most competent experts: professionals who create  technology that transforms the world, as well as those who fully understand these  changes, caution us against mistakes, and predict future developments, including in the  context of ESG. I strongly believe that this is one of the most important platforms for  open dialogue of our era, because AI’s influence on all aspects of our lives will only  increase, and this automatically raises a host of issues that we will only be able to  resolve through international discussion.” 

The first event on the agenda will be the panel discussion on “The Strategic Role and  Economic Potential of Technology Companies in Solving ESG and Sustainable  Development Tasks,” moderated by Alexander Vedyakhin. The participants will include  Tom Gruber, the co-founder, CTO, and head of design for the team that created Siri,  founder and former head of the Advanced Development Group at Apple, and founder of  Humanistic AI; Shukri Dabagi, SAS CEMEA regional vice president; Ambarish Mitra, co founder of Greyparrot and founder and chief product officer at Blippar; and Andrey  Chernogorov, founder and CEO of Bidzaar. 

The conference will also feature a panel session titled “AI and ESG: Solutions for  Businesses” with the participation of the following experts: Daniel Zhou, Eurasia  Region president at Huawei; Ralph Haupter, president of EMEA at Microsoft; Anton  Kosach, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG); and Olga  Uskova, CEO of Cognitive Pilot. Moderating the discussion will be Elina Tikhonova,  RBC television presenter. 

In keynote talks and workshops, experts and entrepreneurs from budding startups will  discuss the role of AI in tackling ESG tasks, discuss how high technology contributes to  the attainment of sustainable development goals facing mankind, present their ESG  designs, and share their opinions on the future and economic potential of AI  development in areas such as medicine, finance, industry, retail, and more. In addition,  an AI ethics forum titled “Laws of the Future 2.0” is scheduled to take place. 

On the second day of the conference, which will be opened by Alexander Vedyakhin  and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko, experts will discuss the scientific  aspects of AI. The focus will be on the development of artificial general intelligence 

(AGI), natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, recommender systems,  automated machine learning (AutoML), speech analytics, and other areas of knowledge.  David Rafalovsky, executive vice president of Sberbank, CTO of Sber, and head of  Technology, will present Sber’s new technological products. AI Journey Junior, a  conference for middle and high school students interested in data science and AI  technology, will be held on the third day. 

The conference will also feature an awards ceremony for the winners and runners-up  of AI Journey Contest, an international online DS/AI competition for adults, and the  international artificial intelligence contest for children organized by Sber and the Artificial  Intelligence Alliance. 

The Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (AIRI) will also present the initial results of  its projects. Jürgen Schmidhuber, chief scientific advisor at AIRI and scientific director at  the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA) (Switzerland), will speak at AI  Journey, as usual. 

The online conference will bring together global AI experts from academic institutions,  international organizations, and the business sector, including: Tomáš Mikolov, senior  researcher at CIIRC CTU; Michael Bronstein, professor at Imperial College London and  USI Lugano and head of Graph ML at Twitter; Marc Hamilton, vice president at NVIDIA;  Catherine Mohr, president of the Intuitive Foundation; Somdeb Majumdar, machine  learning research lead at Intel AI Lab; Stephen Brobst, CTO at Teradata; Anshumali  Shrivastava, associate professor at Rice University and founder of ThirdAI Corp.; and  more. 

Last year’s AI Journey was the world’s largest AI and DS event, with around 30,000  specialists from over 100 countries taking part in the conference. The conference  featured 225 speakers, and their presentations garnered over 30 million views.