AI Expo in Moscow

The event was subtitled ‘The Artificial Intelligence Journey’ and involved over 5,000 participants from 20 countries. Yandex, MTS, Gazprom Neft, Microsoft, IBM, Sberbank, NVIDIA, Huawei, and Mail.ru, were among the exhibitors who were visited in turn by President Putin and senior ministers in the government. Areas of development in high tech and AI were discussed in detail at side forums including Artificial General Intelligence, Computer Vision, Speech Analysis, Recommender Systems, Auto Machine Learning & Meta Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. The use of AI in almost every field of human endeavour was covered by the exhibition, from smart cities to retail outlets, and included discussions on ethics.

Mr Sokolov and Mr Sopin were attending due to their success in the online competition run by the organisers. They issued a challenge to students and scientists to come up with a form of AI that could pass a state Russian writing exam. Our pair were among those who achieved the best results, and their system managed the grammar and spelling parts, but the creative writing part confounded AI fairly universally. The top mark achieved by the computers was 63, an average mark, but impressive under the circumstances.