Leadership of Russia according to Coursera and Mirosoft estimates, commercial prospects of self-driving vehicles and other topics of the month - ICT.Moscow collected the most significant AI-related news of July in one digest.

Success of the Russian AI

In July, Coursera published a ranking of countries by the level of training of IT specialists in different spheres. Russia was ranked first in two out of three categories - “Technologies” and “Data Science”. Analysts named Russia the country with the most highly-qualified specialists in software development and working with data.

As a part of the Global Pilots program for supporting Russian startups, Microsoft Corporation has chosen the most notable artificial intelligence projects. Their authors managed to reach an agreement on pilot projects, establish contacts with international suppliers, start negotiations with investment funds and receive grants.

High efficiency in medicine

At the beginning of July it became known that artificial intelligence algorithms had had processed 150 thousand chest radiological scans in Moscow, mostly for diagnosing COVID-19. So far, the technology has been available in 48 in-patient clinics and 193 polyclinics. At the beginning of the month it was announced that AI would process not only CT scans, but also X-ray scans to diagnose other diseases. The service has been connected to 17 Moscow medical facilities.

Against this background, the level of trust to the technology among patients is increasing. It is confirmed by studies conducted by the Diagnostics and Telemedicine Center of the Moscow Healthcare Department. The results are as follows:

• 50% of Moscow residents positively assess the application of AI in medicine

• 80% of them called the use of the technology reasonable

• 70%  claimed that the quality of medical health had improved.

AI is becoming more deeply-rooted in call centers

Mango Telecom, Russian business telephony operator expanded the application of artificial intelligence in call centers and launched a speech analytics module to control the work of operators and to find out how actively they promote goods or services.

Neuro.net estimates that 63% of all center workers expect that AI will partially replace people in their professional sphere. 13% of people are sure that AI will fully replace them.

Commercial prospects of self-driving vehicles

At the beginning of July journalists of “RIA Novosti” filmed the testing of Yandex.Rover, the company's autonomous delivery robot. ICT.Moscow talked to the team of Yandex Self Driving Cars, and found out that the company uses Rovers in the streets of Moscow on a regular basis to collect data and train machine learning algorithms.

In an interview with ICT.Moscow, a representative of Yandex described where and under what conditions the first commercial vehicles, both Rovers and cars, would be introducted. The company noted that a phased plan for the introduction of the unmanned vehicles in Russia would be further developed. It will be submitted to the president in August.

Other Russian companies are also developing self-driving transport. In mid-July, the unmanned truck “Kamaz” was launched on the territory of the Innopolis University. In northern Russia, the testing of unmanned trucks continues: the government of Ugra has signed an agreement with one of the oil-producing enterprises about another experiment in this field.

Also in July it became known about the plans of the Russian Ministry of Transport and “Russian Railways” to test computer vision technologies for unmanned trains at a virtual test site.