On April 9-10, 2026, Senior Data Scientist at the Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence (ISSAI) at Nazarbayev University, Dr. Zhanat Makhataeva, participated in the International Workshop on “Responsible AI: Navigating the Future of Kazakh Language Models” at the International Farabi Forum held at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (KazNU).
The International Workshop was organized with the support of all consortium members involved in the PTF Grant for 2024-2026, including KazNU, ISSAI, the Institute of Information and Computational Technologies, the A. Baitursynov Institute of Linguistics, Til Qazyna, and Softcraft. ISSAI was invited to present research dedicated to the development of a small language model for the Kazakh language.
The workshop featured more than eight presentations delivered by consortium representatives, who shared modern approaches to the development of large language models (LLMs) and large vision models (LVMs). The event brought together faculty, researchers, students, and AI enthusiasts for a discussion on the future of the Kazakh language in artificial intelligence.
Dr. Zhanat Makhataeva presented an update on ISSAI’s published and in-progress papers for the period from December 2025 to April 2026. She shared the details of the “Multilingual Generative AI Avatar System” that was deployed on an edge device and in the cloud. The presentation covered the system architecture, user study, system performance evaluation metrics, and latency analysis results for the proposed edge- and cloud-based AI avatar system, which supports human-AI interaction in the Kazakh, Russian, and English languages.
Following the presentations, a brief discussion was held with the audience regarding the future of AI-powered avatar systems and the effectiveness of their key components, including speech processing platforms and vision-language models.
During the International Workshop, Dr. Makhataeva also visited facilities on the Farabi University campus, including the Remote Sensing Center, the Supercomputer Center, the Farabi Robotics Center, the Huibo Robotics Center, and the Farabi Hub.