Universities underwent selection within two categories: DS (Data Science) and TOP DS (Top Data Science). ITMO took first place in the former category – and second place in the latter. In total, the university will receive around 350 million rubles in grant funding to develop top-level educational initiatives. These will be available to students of programs AI360: ML Native, Computer Technologies, AI Engineering, Software Engineering, and System and Applied Software once they’ve passed an internal competition.
Upon graduation, TOP DS experts will be able to conduct independent research in AI, including the development of new learning methods and design of new world-class AI model architectures. DS-level specialists will be qualified to fine-tune and train existing models while also working on applied tasks.
Within the project, ITMO students will be supported by partners – major IT and AI players on the Russian market: Yandex, Sberbank, Gazprom Neft, and Avito. In total, it’s expected that over 10,000 such specialists will be trained within the national project by 2030.
