The goal of the project is to get schoolchildren from grades 7-11 interested in AI (artificial intelligence), machine learning and data analysis, and help them develop maths and programming skills.

“It’s not very easy to get your head around AI, especially if you are a child. Despite this, a lot of children are interested in studying this much-talked-about subject,” said Senior Vice President of Sberbank Alexander Vedyakhin. “So we decided to launch Russia’s first Artificial Intelligence Academy, which gives schoolchildren the chance to involve themselves in AI. The project involves our top experts, who have helped put together online lessons, tasks and competitions in a format that is both interesting and understandable for children. Learning about AI will make a massive contribution to children’s futures.”

The Academy will hold a number of events from 1 March to 21 April 2018. The project opens with introductory lessons on AI. Sberbank employees have created these lessons and will teach them at Schools in Moscow and open venues in Russia’s regions. Schoolteachers can also hold the AI lessons at their schools by using the course materials, which will be available for downloading from the website of the High-Tech & Tech Entrepreneurship Weeks (http://htweek.ru/). Sberbank is a partner of HTEW this year.

This year introductory lessons about AI will take place in eight cities across Russia: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Tyumen, Irkutsk, Ulyanovsk, Ivanovo, Tomsk and Yekaterinburg. During the lessons schoolchildren will learn about the history of AI, the main trends and future of AI, machine learning and big data, and begin performing elementary tasks involving AI. It will also be possible to take part in educational competitions on the Academy’s website. On 21 April a hackathon will be held for the Academy’s top pupils.

The project’s website (http://www.ai-academy.ru) features videos of the introductory lessons and tests on the fundamentals of AI. For those who want to go one step further, the site offers tasks that will help schoolchildren master basic skills for working with data and building machine learning models, and let them feel like true data scientists - one of the most sought-after professions in the 21st century.

A competition to carry out tasks to forecast the outcome of rounds of popular computer game Dota will be held for the savviest participants.

And for the finalists of the competition (the top 100 participants), an AI hackathon will be held in Moscow, with great prizes for the winners. The Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and publishing house Prosveshcheniye are partners of the project.