Chemistry, Robots, and Cybersecurity: Highlights of AI Summer School by AIRI and ITMO’s AES

The school is meant to popularize AI technologies and train a new generation of researchers. It was open to students of natural sciences and engineering of all levels studying at Russian universities. In order to get in, students had to provide a CV, letter of motivation, and list of publications. Out of over 1,000 applications, 80 students from 10 Russian regions were selected to take part in the school.

“These days, developing AI is important because it’s a key technology of the future. At ITMO’s AES, we strive to form a community of young people ready to improve their knowledge and skills in machine learning. We also focus on interaction with the expert community, especially with industry leaders, such as AIRI. Thanks to education and exchange of experience between experts and students, we were able to create a unique environment for collaboration,” shares Alexander Vinogradov, the head of ITMO’s Advanced Engineering School. 

Over 10 days, students attended lectures and seminars on multimodal architectures, generative AI in industry and chemistry, embodied AI models, and reinforcement learning in robotics. For the first time this year, the school’s program also featured classes in training safe intelligent systems and AI cybersecurity. All courses were taught by experts from AIRI, ITMO, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Higher School of Economics, Skoltech, Moscow Technical University of Communication and Informatics, and Sberbank’s AI Lab.

Everything learned in class, the school’s participants got to implement in their group research projects that they presented at the end of the school. In total, the students came up with 25 projects, among them those improving AI’s resistance to cyberattacks, user-programmed agents in games, as well as using an LLM to predict molecules’ release and absorption.

“Last year, my older sister took part in the AIRI summer school. She was really impressed by its lecturers and student projects. I got interested in the opportunity and decided to apply. I enjoyed working on our team project at the convenient ITMO coworking spaces open 24/7. Since I am making my first steps in deep learning, this summer school was an intensive introduction to the world of AI. Thanks to the school, I expanded my horizons and decided on my future specialization. I got particularly interested in text-based image, video, and audio generation and natural language processing. It may well be that in the future I will focus on these topics,” shared school participant Elena Grishina, a second-year computer science student at Higher School of Economics.

All participants received certificates of completing the school. Winners of the project presentation stage will be able to continue their research under the supervision of experienced researchers.