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The Far Eastern Artificial Intelligence (AI) Center of the Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) and the image analysis algorithm developed by its team for identifying Amur tigers was presented at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) project competition in the E-Science category.

WSIS serves as an international platform for analyzing achievements in building the information society and aiming for the world's sustainable development. The competition is organized under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union, UNESCO, the United Nations Development Program and UNCTAD. This year, 1,050 applications from all over the world were submitted to the WSIS Prizes competition. Experts nominated only 360 projects including the Far Eastern AI Center of FEFU and one of its products.

The Far Eastern AI Center is a collaborative project of FEFU and Sber, whose activity includes a wide spectrum of tasks - from creating unique software in the most promising areas to conducting large-scale analytical researches on AI regulations in Asia-Pacific region (APR) countries with the support of the program "Priority 2030". Among the central projects there is the tropical cyclones monitoring system, as well as business decisions for optimizing the operation of maritime logistics hubs.

In addition to the Far Eastern Artificial Intelligence (AI) Center, one of its projects, created by the team of FEFU, Sber, the “Amur Tiger” Autonomous  Nonprofit Organization (ANO) and Novosibirsk State University as part of the “Priority 2030” program, was nominated for the competition. It allows recognizing Amur tigers based on the information obtained from camera traps. The software developed by FEFU automates the processing of photo and video materials that may contain images of animals in question. Due to in-depth intellectual analytics of the collected data, the system can identify not only definite species, but also "recognize" a specific individual.

Near real time identification of animals via this system will make it possible to track intrapopulation changes, learn more about the ecology of endangered species, and implement additional protective measures promptly. The modular structure of the system, based on artificial intelligence, adapts it to work with multiple animal species and can identify not only terrestrial inhabitants but also marine animals - for example, dolphins.

“The system can ‘batch’ thousands of photos and video streams in real time. It also ‘recognizes’ individual animals in a single frame. Our system is unique, and it is especially important for us that a significant part of the development team consists of students from the FEFU Institute of Mathematics and Computer Technologies”, - said Director of the Far Eastern AI Centre, Roman Dremlyuga.

Projects of the Far Eastern AI Centre of FEFU have a huge export potential — last year, during the Eastern Economic Forum, representatives of Asian, African, and Latin American countries expressed their interest in them.

 “Artificial Intelligence technologies are a vector of global development, which draws attention of the best experts, engineers, and scientists from around the world.  The fact that the product of the Far Eastern AI Center at FEFU was nominated for the WSIS Prizes indicates that our scientists are already among the leaders, and their projects in the field of information and communication technologies are promising and in demand,” - noted FEFU President, Boris Korobets.

FEFU Far Eastern AI Center and its project has already passed two stages of selection. The next stage of the WSIS Prizes is the open voting session scheduled for March 31. There you can cast a vote for the AI Center or Amur tigers monitoring system. Development team will be grateful for supporting the Russian AI ethics code in which development experts of FEFU have participated, and it was also nominated for the contest.

Let us recall that one of the goals of the Far Eastern AI Center is to promote scientific and educational collaborations in the sphere of artificial intelligence between FEFU, Sber and other partner universities from friendly countries. FEFU has developed networks in the Asia-Pacific region, and it is a sought-after expert platform for coordinating international interests, and that is why it is becoming an expert “point of entry” in Asia for scientific, educational and commercial enterprises.