On January 30, 2025, Founding Director of the Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI), Prof. Huseyin Atakan Varol, and Data Scientist Rakhat Meiramov attended the seminar “Artificial Intelligence: New Horizons for Digital Transformation in Universities” organized by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan at Satbayev University in Almaty. The event brought together leadership from 73 universities across the country.
Prof. Atakan Varol participated as a keynote speaker, presenting the Institute’s activities and its contributions to the development of artificial intelligence in Kazakhstan. During his presentation, the newly unveiled Oylan multimodal language-vision model, developed by ISSAI, was demonstrated by the data scientist Rakhat Meiramov, one of the key members of the ISSAI generative AI research team. This advanced model is capable of processing both images and text seamlessly across Kazakh, Russian, and English languages.
Additionally, Prof. Varol shared the team’s experience in developing a large language model specifically for the Kazakh language. He provided insights into the dataset collection process, the creation of initial benchmarks for evaluating Kazakh language models, and the challenges the ISSAI team faced during development.
In closing, he outlined the Institute’s plans for the upcoming year which will culminate in the creation of Kazakh multimodal sparse generative AI model. Moreover, he emphasized the further development of AI technologies and the strengthening of collaborations with both domestic and international partners.
Following the presentation, an engaging discussion took place during the coffee break, where participants explored the future of AI and scientific research in Kazakhstan, as well as potential avenues for future cooperation.