ITMO To Receive Over a Billion Rubles for Cutting-Edge AI Research

The contest was held by the Ministry of Economic Development as part of the federal project Artificial Intelligence within the national project Data Economy. The grants are allocated to universities and scientific organizations engaged in advanced research in the field of strong AI. 

ITMO’s Research Center “Strong AI in Industry" became one of the seven grant winners this year. The center will be granted 676 million rubles, complete with an additional grant of 340 million rubles from the program’s partners: the Digital Technologies in Industry Association, Sberbank, and Tatneft. This will make the overall total more than one billion rubles. 

The Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko announced the results of the contest’s third wave  at the Coordination Center of the Government of Russia. 

“Each of the seven winners in the contest’s third wave will receive a 676-million-ruble grant for the period of 2025-2026 to conduct research in the field of strong, trustworthy, and multi-agent AI. The total funding for all research centers will sum up to 4.7 billion rubles,” notes Dmitry Chernyshenko.

In 2025-2026, the scientists at the Research Center “Strong AI in Industry” will be concentrating on automating the development life cycle of large foundation models based on multi-agent systems (MAS). Foundation models are neural networks of exceptional complexity and capacity that are trained on massive amounts of different data and therefore can solve a wide range of tasks. Multi-agent systems are made up of several interacting agents, each having their own action strategy and decision-making ability.

Collective behavior of agents and associated novel characteristics of AI may help researchers reach the level of cognitive complexity that will bring out the most distinctive properties of strong AI – versatility, contextual understanding, and self-improvement. Therefore, the creation of MAS architecture is especially relevant today. Although some tasks can be covered with small, manually-crafted systems, industrial systems require a significant number of agents, which could not be produced without a fully automated development cycle. 

The results of the research will be integrated into innovative software products. These include an open-source framework for automating MAS development, as well as a hardware environment for experiments with agents and piloting. With the help of these tools, the ITMO team will create three AI systems based on the industrial agents for the oil and gas industry, urban development, and research (chemistry and clinical medicine). Specialists from two institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Almazov National Medical Research Centre will assist in the study and approbation of the developed systems. 

Furthermore, ITMO University will launch module-based continuous professional development and retraining programs in AI for qualified clients, developers of industrial LLMs, and AI experts. 

“Today’s multi-agent AI systems are one-of-a-kind pieces of art that are produced by hand. However, these developments cannot be scaled up until we switch to a more affordable, mass production. That’s why our key objective now is to create strong AI technologies that will help us manufacture specialized AI systems,” notes Alexander Boukhanovsky, the head of ITMO’s School of Translational Information Technologies and Research Center “Strong AI in Industry.” 

In October 2021, ITMO’s Research Center “Strong AI in Industry” became one of the six winners in the grant contest held as part of the federal project Artificial Intelligence. The center’s mission is to produce domestic AI technologies and train specialists for high-tech companies. 

Since its establishment, the center’s researchers have attracted 22 industrial partners – Sberbank, Gazprom Neft, Tatneft, and others – and produced an ecosystem of open-source solutions for various industrial needs. Among their developments are an algorithm for turning medicine into pills; an AI designer for industrial and port facilities in the Arctic region; and a technology for detecting anomalies in pipeline magnetograms.

As noted by Dmitry Chernyshenko, President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin declared the need to focus on fundamental research in AI and expand the use of these technologies in other fields. The federal competition for research centers was conducted as part of the Artificial Intelligence project operated by the Ministry of Economic Development.

“AI research centers proved to be an excellent investment. The centers of the first wave were involved in developing strong, trustworthy, and ethical AI, whereas those in the second one focused on studies in medicine, transportation, industry, and smart cities. The centers of the third wave make up practically half of the country’s scientific reserve in AI. President Vladimir Putin set the goal of publishing at least 450 papers at top-level AI conferences by 2030. We see that our investments produce results so the government continues to support such projects,” emphasizes Dmitry Chernyshenko. 

The Deputy Prime Minister also added that leading Russian scientists had a foresight session in fundamental and exploratory studies in AI in 2024. At the meeting, the world-renowned researchers defined ten priority AI fields for the next few years.

“These fields should serve as a strategic focus for state investments and, as it often happens, extrabudgetary funding. The winners of the contest’s third wave were selected based on these priorities, and further research in Russia is planned to be connected to these domains, as well. Moreover, the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education are also working on a unified research program in AI that will solidify these priorities,” concludes Dmitry Chernyshenko. 

Additionally, he asked the selected centers to support the winners and prize-winners of student AI competitions that participated in the event. In total, the competition received 19 applications from centers in 10 regions. Their development programs cover the foresight session’s key priorities: agent and multi-agent systems, strong AI, and fundamental and generative AI models. 

“In 2025, Skolkovo Foundation’s Strategic Agency for Support and Formation of AI Development (SAPFIR) acted as a coordinator of the competition's third wave. The winners will be granted 676 million rubles each for 2 years to conduct research in the field of strong, trustworthy, and multi-agent AI. Within the next two years, SAPFIR will support the research centers to help them achieve set goals, both research and commercial ones. Their activities are meant to build the country’s AI reserve and attract Russia’s top specialists to the field,” announces Tatiana Soyuznova, the head of the Strategic Agency for Support and Formation of AI Development (SAPFIR).