17 projects qualified for the final of the AI Russia Awards. In each of the main categories, the jury selected three most effective cases of business applications of artificial intelligence technologies. Five projects are shortlisted in the category "Significant Social Impact". The winners will be announced on June, 25 at the award ceremony.

More than 120 Russian AI implementation projects with proven economic efficiency applied for the AI Russia Awards. The Award was established by the Alliance for the development of artificial intelligence. The projects are published in the AI Russia Works library. The expert jury selected the finalists in four main business categories.

Shortlist in the category "Revenue Growth":
- a system for analyzing and predicting electricity consumption developed by PREDICT, Mail.ru Group. It allowed an electric company Rosseti Center to increase the indicator of determining commercial losses by 2.2 times;
- Dasha.AI. This calling service helped the company Alfa Strakhovanie to increase the number of renewals of third party liability insurance policies by 1.5 times;
- ML - HeadHunter's own solution for the selection of relevant job offers. It made possible to increase sales of job publications on hh.ru by 39.7% during one year.

Shortlist in the category "Cost reduction " includes cases from the field of agriculture, finance and industry:
- Cognitive Agro Pilot, the system of autonomous agricultural facilities management. It helped the agriculture enterprise "Pobeda" to reduce direct crop losses and fuel costs;
- the voice robot "Oleg" by Tinkoff. It saves 33 million rubles monthly for the bank by automating its call center; - "Monitoring-Predictive", the system of predictive diagnostics of electric motors. It allowed "Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works" to avoid long downtime of equipment and reduce costs.

Shortlist in the category "Productivity Growth":
- mobile app "Thermal Points", a map of all fires in the country with the function of notifying the authorities responsible for extinguishing. EMERCOM of Russia developed this app on the basis of an ML model selected at the WILDFIRE AI hackathon organized by Sberbank;
- an automated system that predicts the efficiency of acid treatment of wells and reduces the share of manual labor of specialists by 20%. It was developed by the team of Gazprom Neft;
- - the voice robot "Oleg" by Tinkoff. It receives 80% of incoming calls from customers and closes 10% of requests on its own.

Shortlist in the category "Quality Improvement" includes cases from the field of medicine and finance:
- "Celsus", a system for the analysis of medical images in radiology. It helped the Tambov Regional Oncological Clinical Dispensary to increase the number of cases of early diagnosis of breast cancer by 10%;
- Botkin.AI, a platform for CT image analysis. It allowed the Medical Information and Analytical Center of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District to increase the detection of lung cancer by 45%;

In the category "Significant Social Impact", the winners have been selected in the online voting which finished on May, 30. There are five projects:
- technology for sorting photos from drones "Beeline AI" - Search for people". It helps the volunteers of "Lisa Alert» to find the missing people;
- mobile app "Thermal Points" of the EMERCOM of Russia. It speeds up the response to wildfires;
- Botkin.AI, a platform for CT image analysis in the Medical Information and Analytical Center of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District;
- a technology of neural network-based hand gesture classification for highly functional prosthetics;
- "Robin", an assistive device for people with visual impairments. Without an Internet connection, it helps to recognize objects and people.

Another open voting on the award's website was selecting the finalist in the second special category "Popularizer of AI technologies". This is an award for personal contribution to the promotion of AI.

The winners in each category will be announced on June 25 at 18: 30 at the first awarding ceremony of AI Russia Awards. The online broadcast will be available on the website https://ai-russia.ru/awards

Six companies-Yandex, SBER, Mail.ru the Group, Gazprom Neft, MTS and RDIF have joined together to form the Alliance for the development of artificial intelligence. Among the tasks of the Association, for example, assistance with the creation of regulatory documents, support for education, and creation of personnel reserves in this area. More information about how the participants are going to change the IT sphere in Russia, the head of the Alliance Kirill Bulatov told TASS. About a year ago, CEOs realized that they had reached the point where development depends on how fast everything is moving around — how quickly laws are passed to help launch products, how widely technologies are being implemented in the public sector and business. The main prerequisite for the emergence of the Alliance was to combine interests for solving business problems of participants in the first place in the following areas: education, regulatory regulation, communication between market participants, implementation practices and attracting investment, General directions in the field of data analysis. Based on this, the principles of work are built, in which it is said that we do not attract funds from the state. The Association's budget consists of the money of the participating companies. We also focus on tasks that are more effective to solve together, while eliminating competition between members of the Alliance.

The Artificial Intelligence Journey (AI Journey) conference will be held on November 20-22, 2020. This is Russia's largest forum on artificial intelligence. AI Journey includes an online competition, a large-scale international conference and regional conferences in seven Russian cities, as well as the first AI Journey Junior conference for high school students interested in  AI technologies. All events in the series will be held online. The AI Journey international online conference will have a three-day format with dedicated scientific, business and regional days. The AI for Good event will include key topics like the latest developments in machine learning and data analysis, along with many others. AI Journey is a major platform for exchanging the latest information about artificial intelligence and its application in Russia and abroad. In 2019, AI Journey made it into the top five global DS/AI conferences, with about 9,000 participants from all over the world and more than 150 leading industry experts as speakers. Register for AI Journey events at  www.ai‑journey.ru

The Ministry of Economic Development has announced how law 258-FZ on “digital sandboxes” will work. It simplifies the rules for organizations that conduct experiments in AI and related areas. Each company can design their own specific implementation, but the plan will need to be approved by governement agencies and market participants.