On April 11-12th, ISSAI members, including deputy director Yerbol Absalyamov and leading data scientist Madina Abdrakhmanova, represented Nazarbayev University at Ala-Too International University in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The purpose of the visit was to sign a Memorandum of Understanding between the two universities. They also delivered a series of seminars on ISSAI’s research activities and computational resources and discussed a topic “Multimodal Learning: datasets, architectures and models”, which was presented by Madina Abdrakhmanova.
ISSAI team discussed with Ala-Too International University rector Dr. Zhyldyzbek Zhakshylykov, vice-rector for scientific work Dr. Salidin Kaldybayev, dean of Engineering and Informatics Dr. Ruslan Issayev, coordinator of Graduate programs in the Philology department Dr. Nurzat Kazakova and coordinator of Innovation development Center Mr. Radmir Gumerov on the Roadmap of creating the first Kyrgyz ASR. Currently, Kyrgyz colleagues are collecting data, after that they will process the data with ISSAI support and then both Parties will start training the model.
Ala-Too International University is enthusiastic about collaborating with Kazakhstani partners to create the first Kyrgyz ASR, with a target completion date by the end of this year. They are committed to working closely with ISSAI, aiming to collect and process data by August 2024, and are keen on expanding collaboration into areas like robotics, medicine, and student/researcher exchanges. Additionally, they have requested an online lecture on AI and ML from ISSAI, and we are always ready to support and collaborate with Central Asian countries.
In 2021, ISSAI together with Computer Systems department of Tashkent University of Information Technology named after Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi created first Uzbek speech corpus and last year we successfully created first Tatar ASR and TTS with Institute of Applied Semiotics under Tatarstan Academy of Sciences, Kazan, Russia.