Artificial Intelligence in Russia Issue 18, January 15, 2021

The Artificial Intelligence in Russia newsletter features a summary of recent Russian-language reports on the Russian AI and autonomy ecosystem, divided into the following sections:

• Governance and Legal Developments
• Military and Security Developments
• Corporate and Market Developments
• Education and Training Developments
• International Collaboration
• Article: General Staff Journal Discusses Military AI, AI in Nuclear Weapons
• Spotlight: S-500 Prometey

The following preview shows the first item in this issue:

1. Russian government develops initial list of AI projects for implementation

In December, the Russian Ministry of Digital Development released a preliminary list of AI projects for implementation in four Russian ministries and three government departments. The list, which details projects for implementation from 2023 to 2024, will not be final until the relevant government agencies approve all proposed projects.

The proposed projects include using AI to aid the following agencies with certain endeavors:

• The Ministry of Internal Affairs with searching for serial criminals and drawing composite images
• The Ministry of Emergencies with analyzing photographs and images to, for example, assess natural disasters
• The Ministry of Health with identifying neoplasms and signs of COVID-19 on CT images, images from microscopes, and information obtained through radiation diagnostics
• The Ministry of Industry and Trade with building a chat bot based on neural networks that can consult users, as well as with analyzing applicant documents
• Rosreestr (the government department for registration and cartography) with distributing documents by type and analyzing images to find capital construction objects
• The Federal Tax Service with developing a voice assistant for use in consultations, andwith creating classifiers for new questions and product names
• The Federal Fund for Compulsory Health Information with building a service to formulate tariffs for the provision of medical care, and with building a voice assistant to collect feedback from the public.

The government will distribute funds to the government agencies implementing AI projects as part of their digital transformation programs. The total cost of the agency digital transformation programs can go into the tens of billions of rubles. For example, the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ AI project will cost an estimated 55 billion rubles.