They say the world is getting smaller. But with more and more family and friends living far apart and business being done across long distances, it can still feel very big. What a personal and professional boost then for people to have the ability to project their realistic presences into a place thousands of miles away.

This lesser-known application of AI, known as ‘telepresence’¹, is one of the focuses of the Samsung AI Center in Moscow. Samsung Newsroom spoke to Dr. Victor Lempitsky, who leads Samsung’s Moscow AI Center, to find out more about what his center is working on and what he sees for the future of AI.

AI and Telepresence

The overarching research area that Samsung’s Moscow AI Center works on is that of ‘machine learning’, which is a core AI capability that encompasses the areas of language understanding, computer vision and data analysis. Specifically, the center works on next-generation core technology for machine learning, as well as the solutions that will allow them to apply this technology to image and video creation.

“We work on vision learning and telepresence,” Lempitsky relates, “which means developing new experiences that make users who are far apart feel as much like they’re physically together as possible.” It may not initially be clear how exactly AI is pertinent to the area of ‘telepresence’, but Lempitsky explains. “We use computer vision and machine learning to recognize and learn human motions. Then, we use those learned motions to complete a realistic simulation of a person.”

“The ‘Neural Network Rendering’ project has been one of the Moscow AI Center’s major achievements,” Lempitsky continues, “It involved using neural networks to render humans as so-called ‘neural avatars’.”

Asked about other applications for this technology, Lempitsky explains that, “It has made it possible for us to create a 3D digital version of a person’s head from just a single image,” and that “It can also be utilized for a wide range of telepresence applications.”

Awards Success

Russia is globally prominent when it comes to foundational subject areas such as mathematics, physics and source technology. As such, the Moscow AI Center is expected to be a driving force when it comes to leading the AI developments of the future.

Due to the groundbreaking work done by its expert personnel, the Moscow AI Center has accrued an impressive list of awards and nominations.

In 2018, the Moscow AI Center won a competition initiated by NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), the world’s biggest AI conference. The center also achieved meaningful results at the ECCV (European Conference on Computer Vision) and ICCV (International Conference on Computer Vision).

Lempitsky himself was also awarded a Scopus Award in 2018 for his contributions to the industry. Scopus is the world’s largest global base of peer-reviewed scientific literature, and the award is given to highly cited Russian researchers.

Samsung Devices to Optimize Computer Vision

Samsung has announced that it plans to connect the more than 500 million devices it sells each year and make them intelligent. Asked how the Moscow AI Center is contributing to this vision, Lempitsky remarks that Samsung has broad expertise when it comes to hardware. He points out that an increasing number of devices now incorporate in-device cameras and visual sensors, illustrating that computer vision technology is only set to become more and more instrumental to the industry going forward.

“Our center’s mission is to provide state-of-the-art computer vision software to underpin Samsung’s top-of-the-line hardware and service. I think that’s how we fit in to the wider vision and provide convenience to consumers.”

The Future of AI

Asked what he expects to see over the next 50 years of AI development, Lempitsky notes that 50 years ago people wouldn’t have come close to accurately guessing where we’d be now, but issues some predictions regardless. He says, “I think AI technology will most likely plateau and become the kind of very commonplace technology that people just take for granted. Computers will be able to scan and process visual information just like humans do, and that too will no longer be something that people marvel at.”

Speaking about short-term goals, Lempitsky explains that the Moscow AI Center wants to develop outstanding telepresence capabilities that can create value for people and provide them with new experiences. He outlines how he expects these capabilities will change people’s lives, saying that, “People won’t have to fly, say, from Seoul to Moscow, because they will instead put on devices equipped with AR or VR and be transported to a common environment where the feeling of being present is as strong as being physically together.” Lempitsky is confident that ‘telepresence as real as physical presence’ won’t exist only in sci-fi scenarios for much longer either, saying, “I’m optimistic that this can become a reality.”

Speaking about the business applications of the technology, Lempitsky says, “We anticipate that telepresence developments will transform our behaviors quite significantly.” He also comments that the introduction of telepresence technology will likely lead to an increased uptake in, and different perception of, people working remotely.

Finally, Lempitsky speaks to how developments in this area will help friends and families separated by some distance feel closer to one another, saying that, “Soon, we hope that people will come to see video chats as being as obsolete as sending a message by telegraph seems to us right now.”

¹ Telepresence refers to technologies that allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance of being present, or to otherwise have an effect at a place other than their actual location.

This summer saw a second AI Bootcamp Summer School take place in Moscow; Samsung’s DesArrolladoras program, designed to help women break into technological fields, launched its third phase in Spain this September; and Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC) launched this October following several successful similar initiatives around the world.

Where Technology Meets Business

The second annual AI Bootcamp Summer School for local students took place at the Samsung Artificial Intelligence Center in Moscow (SAIC-Moscow) this summer. Following a competitive application process, sixteen students from local higher education institutions took part in two weeks of classes on big data for business organized by Samsung Research Russia.

Along with a program similar to the 2018 AI Bootcamp Summer School, which familiarized students with approaches to solving non-trivial tasks related to computer vision, this year’s AI Bootcamp Summer School saw the inclusion of an introduction course to the data-analyst and contemporary marketing professions, providing students with the opportunity to learn how to work with big data and machine learning in business contexts.

The AI Bootcamp Summer School program was also supplemented by additional lectures on biometrics, computer vision and the management of research projects. These lectures were given by Samsung Research Russia employees, providing students with first-hand, practical perspectives on these subjects. The program ended with student presentations and an awards ceremony during which participants received certificates of completion.

Shifting the Balance for Women in Technology

Samsung’s DesArrolladoras program launched its third phase this September in Madrid following the successful outcome of its previous iterations, which have already helped over 1,000 women of various ages expand their technological knowledge to the end of personal and professional development. The initiative, in partnership with Bejob, provides training to women in programming and other technological fields regardless of previous experience.

Participants from a variety of different stages in their careers took part in the DesArrolladoras program. 60% were employed while attending, 22% were seeking work and 11% were pursuing other studies while undertaking the program, which provided its students with the opportunity to acquire highly valuable skills and knowledge for today’s competitive job market. Furthermore, the top 40 achievers of the program’s 300 students will have the opportunity to take a course on AI and big data, valued at 7,000 euros.

The program’s curriculum provides an introduction to the fundamentals of AI, natural language processing, machine learning and deep learning, as well as programming languages required in the field of AI. Furthermore, in the Big Data unit, students are trained in data analysis, management and storage, as well as programming and Business Intelligence.

With this latest edition of the DesArrolladoras program, Samsung is strengthening its commitment to helping women succeed in the field of technology, providing the students with the necessary expertise for a constantly shifting, increasingly demanding sector.

An Education for Future Generations

Samsung Innovation Campus (SIC), a new program that builds on the positive outcomes of Samsung’s previous youth education programs including the Samsung Tech Institute, which has been running since 2013 and provided valuable experience for over 110,000 young people in over 30 countries, launched this October in Russia. SIC offers young people the chance to enhance both their practical technological knowledge as well as their employment prospects through both classroom learning and online-based courses (the latter from 2020).

Culminating in official certification, the skills at the core of the SIC curriculum are rooted in future technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), big data, cloud and mobile platforms, and more. On top of this core syllabus, additional programs, tailored to each country where SIC takes place, will offer students a uniquely customized course experience. Some examples of Samsung Innovation Campus programs include the educational projects “SAMSUNG IT SCHOOL” and “Samsung IT Academy”, which have been successfully developed in Russia.

Having launched in Russia, the initiative will gradually expand to Vietnam, Spain, Indonesia, Chile, Thailand and other countries in the near future, so as to empower and enable a new generation of problem solvers by equipping them with the future-proof skills and localized knowledge to work towards a brighter future.

With initiatives such as these, Samsung is bringing activities to educate people on the skills and technologies key to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, such as AI, to people all over the world. Since the launch of its new vision for its global citizenship initiative, “Enabling People”, Samsung has been working continuously towards helping people succeed within the field of technology for the betterment of their own, as well as the global, community.

Pavel Ostyakov, one of the researchers from SAIC-Moscow, won first place among 110 teams in the “Inclusive Images Challenge,” a Kaggle¹ competition hosted by Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2018, which took place in Montreal, Canada from December 3^rd to the 8^th. NeurIPS, formerly known as NIPS, is the world’s largest conference in the field of AI and machine learning. In 2017, over 8,000 researchers and scientists attended the event. In addition to those in machine learning and neuroscience research, experts from many related fields such as cognitive science, computer vision, statistical linguistics, and information theory actively participate in the conference. Winning the challenge at this prestigious event was a significant achievement for both Pavel and Samsung. Pavel was also named a Kaggle Grandmaster, which is the highest tier possible for contributors, and is currently ranked as one of the world’s top five scientists on Kaggle.

In the “Inclusive Images Challenge,” participants developed image recognition and classifier models that can successfully perform image classification tasks even when the test images are geographically and culturally different from the previously shown images in the provided dataset.

(Left image, from left) Pavel Ostyakov, a Researcher at Samsung AI Center-Moscow (SAIC-Moscow), and Jin Wook Lee, the Head of Samsung R&D Institute Russia. (Right image) A snapshot of SAIC-Moscow’s opening ceremony, which took place in May of this year

For example, an image classifier may fail to properly apply “wedding” related labels, such as “bride,” “groom,” and “celebration,” to an image, if a couple is not wearing traditional western European wedding attires or colors. This challenge attempts to address the biases in previously existing algorithms and classifier models. Through the challenge, researchers can identify ways to teach image classifiers to generalize the accumulated data and apply them in new geographic and cultural contexts. The expectation is that the scientific community will make even more progress in inclusive machine learning that benefits everyone, everywhere.

Such competitions reflect the movement towards realization of ethical and non-discriminatory AI, which also aligns with Samsung’s goal and vision. To this end, Samsung has recently joined the Partnership on AI (PAI) to take part in the development of inclusive, fair, and responsible AI technology.

Last September, the SAIC-Moscow team also participated in “The 2nd YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge,” hosted by the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2018. ECCV is one of the world’s top research conferences in the area of computer vision, held biennially. In this Kaggle competition, researchers were provided with public YouTube-8M training and validation datasets that consist of millions of videos with labels, and then asked to develop classification algorithms to accurately predict the labels for 700,000 previously unseen YouTube videos. The SAIC-Moscow team utilized a unique approach in its complex model and data analysis, taking second place by a very narrow margin.

An exterior view of the White Square Business Center, where SAIC-Moscow is located

“We love these competitions because they provide us with opportunities to measure ourselves against the best in the AI industry,” said Pavel Ostyakov at SAIC-Moscow. “Researchers at Samsung are obsessed with making AI a part of everyday lives. So, it is exciting to take part in the challenges where we can contribute our skills to develop the technology.”

The global AI centers reflect Samsung’s commitment to next-generation AI development. Besides Russia, there are six others located across the globe – Korea, Silicon Valley and New York in the U.S., Toronto and Montreal in Canada, and Cambridge, the U.K. Each location is conducting research, focused on a different area of unique strengths. These AI centers are playing a pivotal role in realizing Samsung’s vision for human-centric AI technologies and products.

¹An online community allowing users to find and publish datasets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment, work with others, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges.