South Ural State University has received grant support within the frameworks of the “Artificial Intelligence” Federal Project of the “Data Economy and Digital Transformation of the State” National Project in order to create the “VirtUM” Centre for Top-level Academic Programmes in the Field of Artificial Intelligence.
A number of universities from all regions of Russia competed for the right to receive grants. Universities were selected at two levels: TOP-DS (“Top Data Science”) and DS (“Data Science”). South Ural State University was among the winners in the DS group.
“Our application was supported by SBER (which provided a significant amount for co-financing the project), as well as the 3DiVi company and the Innovations for Kids company,” noted Rector Alexander Wagner. “All of them will be directly participating in the creation and implementation of our new educational programme.”
The grant implementation period is 6 years, and the first 155 students will begin their studies in September after passing the competitive selection process. The university's industrial partners will be actively involved in the implementation of the project, the goal of which is to train world-class specialists in the field of AI using advanced knowledge and applied cases within the frameworks of higher education.
“This will be a fundamentally new, unique programme that we will develop according to the competences-based model,” said project manager, Director of the SUSU Institute of Natural Sciences and Mathematics Alena Zamyshlyaeva. “Our teaching staff who will participate in its creation will take training in supplementary professional academic programmes in the field of artificial intelligence.”
Teaching staff of South Ural State University have considerable experience in teaching artificial intelligence technologies to both Bachelor’s and Master’s degree students. Since 2022, scientific teams have implemented a large number of projects related to the application of artificial intelligence technologies: predictive system for monitoring emissions from industrial enterprises; intelligent system for monitoring the concentration of pollutants from vehicles in real time (AIMS Eco); machine vision system for navigating a hydrogen technology demonstrator of fully reusable advanced vertical takeoff and landing launch vehicles; system for intelligent analysis and forecasting of trends in the development of damage to the equipment of the rolling line LPTs-11 based on information from sensors for diagnosing the state of process equipment and process parameters, and more.
Today, it is difficult to imagine an area of human activity where artificial intelligence technologies would not be used, so graduates who have completed training under the new programme will undoubtedly find jobs even before graduating.