ITMO’s updated Development Strategy describes the university’s transition to the model of a research and educational corporation through product thinking and shared “win-win” goals with industry leaders. At the core of the development strategy are national projects: for instance, the university’s professional training project Education for Technological Leadership aligns with the national project Data Economy, while the initiative Breakthrough Research – with the national project New Materials and Chemistry. One of ITMO’s key focus areas is AI, which now lies at the core of the university’s educational, research, and business processes.
“We want to add a technological aspect to our research and educational corporation: to fully implement the coveted product-oriented approach at ITMO. For this purpose, we need to transform the university’s management system to make the goals of our development strategy mirror those of our industrial partners,” says ITMO Rector Vladimir Vasilyev.
One of the university’s strategic projects will focus on developing AGI (artificial general intelligence) technologies; AGI is a kind of AI capable of learning on its own, adapting to unfamiliar situations, and solving any cognitive tasks within the range of human capacity. By creating professional development tools based on composite AI technologies, ITMO will not only help make AI accessible and wide-spread among businesses of various sizes, but also secure its niche on the high-tech market.
“We are ready to create popular high-tech products based on our competencies and solutions in AI and bring them to market with our partners. In the future, our products will become available to millions of users. ITMO’s contribution to ensuring technological leadership is not just the creation of AI assistants for lecturers, researchers, and leaders, but also the development of composite AI capable of producing efficient tools for businesses tailored to each company’s tasks and resources,” adds Daria Kozlova, the head of ITMO’s Development Strategy.
Credit: Sociocenter
Within the framework of its updated Development Strategy, ITMO University will focus on fostering and attracting talent, identifying new scientific frontiers, developing new technologies, as well as forming engineering thinking, product, and marketing skills. In this new system, AI will be a cross-cutting technology that helps transform every area of the university’s development. Moreover, being a part of Priority 2030 allows the university to quickly provide the conditions for the training of frontier AI specialists, implementation of ML into research, academic, and management processes, as well as promotion of the product-based approach and business thinking among students and staff.
