OpenTalks.AI /
19-20 February 2026
Belgrade, Serbia

UPMC professor of Computer Science in the Machine Learning Department, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Ruslan works in the field of statistical machine learning. His research interests include Deep Learning, Probabilistic Graphical Models, and Large-scale Optimization.

He completed his graduate studies under the scientific supervision of Dmitry Vetrov and Ivan Oseledets, doing research at the intersection of tensor methods and machine learning. Works as a senior research scientist at DeepMind, in the field of offline RL.

Research Scientist Manager, Llama team
Tatiana has dedicated a decade to researching and developing open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for the world's languages, including BLOOM, mGPT, and various evaluation frameworks.

Professor of Computer Science (Software, Data and Technology)
School of Computer Science & Engineering.
h-index - 147

Director of Artificial Intelligence Development, Yandex

PhD, Senior Researcher at the Lebedev Physical Institute,
Vice President of the Russian Association of Neuroinformatics

MD, PhD, FRAS
Institute for Advanced Brain Studies, MSU

PhD, Associate Professor, Head scientific group "Modern data analysis in science and engineering", Skoltech

PhD, Associate Professor at the Department of Big Data and Information Retrieval, Faculty of Computer Science, National Research University Higher School of Economics. Lecturer at the Yandex School of Data Analysis.

Researcher at Laboratory of Mathematical Logic of the St. Petersburg Branch of the Mathematical Institute, RAS and Laboratory of Internet Research, HSE, professor of the Academic University, RAS. 

Founder & CEO, Recraft
Recraft V3 is the most recent model and is used by default. Released in October 2024, it ranked first for five consecutive months on the Artificial Analysis public benchmark on Hugging Face, maintaining a clear lead over models from Midjourney, OpenAI, and others.

Senior Quantitative Researcher with 6 years in High-Frequency Trading. Currently responsible for driving ML across the entire trading strategy pipeline in traditional markets.

Founder of the EORA group of companies, co-founder of DisplAir. Graduate of Moscow State University. Lomonosov. Three times laureate of our suburbs award. Multiple winner of Russian and international hackathons.

Principal Engineer and Team Lead at Huawei
Candidate of Technical Sciences
Associate Professor, Department of Information Systems and Technologies, NRU HSE.

Nebius (ex-Imperial College London, Yandex, IMM UB RAS). His research focuses on reinforcement learning and optimal control for agentic and physical systems. Anton has published extensively in top-tier venues, including ICML and NeurIPS.

Leading Research Fellow, AIRI & ISP RAS

Independent researcher, AI engineer at Optic.inc

Head of the Data Analysis department, Kandinsky Lab; PhD student at MIPT; One of the creators of the Kandinsky and Kandinsky Video models

Tatiana hold an M.Sc. in Language Science and Technology from Saarland University. After graduation, joined the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) as a PhD student and researcher. Currently, Tatiana is on leave from her PhD program to pursue an internship at JetBrains, where Tatiana am part of the AI Writing Assistance team. Research interests include efficient data augmentation, dialogue processing, multilingual and low-resource scenarios.

Dmitry Yudin is the Head of the Intelligent Transport Laboratory at the Center for Cognitive Modeling of MIPT and a Principal Research Scientist at AIRI. As part of the Autorobotics team, he won the UpGreat “Level Five” autonomous vehicle competition in 2024 and received the Moscow Region Governor’s Award for Young Scientists in 2023. Since 2009, he has been engaged in research and development in the fields of computer vision and intelligent robotics.

Team Lead, YandexGPT pretraining

Founder True Click Technologies|
Founder myCouncil

philosopher, engineer, systems architect at Naevius Fze

Co-founder myCouncil

Founder of AI Ecosystem, ex-CDO Sber, ex-CTO AI Venture Studio

Principal Engineer in Microsoft Azure

Master's graduate of ITMO University

Computer Vision Team Leader in Severstal Digital. 10+ year of experience in Computer Vision and Machine Learning

PhD in Physics and Mathematics, Director of the Department for Development and Implementation of Artificial Intelligence Systems at BIA Technologies. 10 years of experience in developing logistics planning and automation systems using mathematical optimisation, machine learning and computer vision method

Petr Vytovtov is a lead of an ML and weather forecasting quality team in Yandex Weather. Has 9+ years of experience in Deep Learning and 6+ years in a Weather Forecasting area.

PhD, Senior researcher, lead of Embodied agents team at AIRI, associate professor at Center for Cognitive Modeling MIPT

PhD, head of Kaspersky Neuromorphic Platform, that is based on spiking neural networks and neuromorphic chip Altay, head of development of predictive analytic system "Kaspersky Machine Learning for Anomaly Detection"

PhD, Senior Solution Architect in the Technology Research Department of Kaspersky Lab. Oleg is working on neuromorphic AI development for robotics, operational technologies control, and cybersecurity.

Researcher in the field of spiking neural networks at Kaspersky Lab, head of neuromorphic computation laboratory at Chuvash State University

Dr. of Sciences (Physics and Math), Prof. RAS, Scientific Director of the MIPT Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Director of AI & Computer Vision of the State Research Institute of Aviation Systems (GosNIIAS), Chairman of Scientific Council of the Russian Association of AI (RAAI)

Dr. of Technical Sciences, Senior Researcher/Full Professor at HSE University

PhD, Head of the Department, Professor, Faculty of Computer Science / Department of Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence
Head of the Laboratory - Faculty of Computer Science / International Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and Structural Analysis
Academic Director of the Educational program - Data Science

Associate Professor of the Department of Data Analysis and Machine Learning at the Financial University (since 2020), Head of the Youth Laboratory of Computer Vision (since 2023), researcher at ITMO University (since 2022), Researcher at Ulyanovsk State Technical University (since 2023). Head of the Master's degree program "Computer Vision" at the Financial University

Head of the Computer Vision Neural Network Technology Group. MIPT graduate. Former researcher at the Interdepartmental Supercomputing Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences and leading developer at NTechLab. Interests include deep learning, computer vision, and information retrieval.

PhD, Professor of Computer Science at Constructor University, Professor of Computer Science at National Research University Higher School of Economics

CTO and co-founder of Codeplain, where he develops spec-driven development technology that transforms plain language specifications into production-ready code. With over 16 years of software engineering experience in early-stage startups, he specializes in building scalable systems and engineering teams.

AI researcher and analyst, and a serial entrepreneur with 25 years of experience in technology commercialization. He serves as Chief Analyst at the MIPT Center for Artificial Intelligence and leads the “Almanac Artificial Intelligence” project. He is a strategic AI advisor at Huawei, Director of OpenTalks.AI, and founder of several tech startups.

Co-founder of Karimi, an AI-powered career app helping professionals navigate, grow, and change direction. Chiara builds human-centered products using AI, NLP, and embeddings to support hiring, upskilling, and career decisions. She has worked across startups and public sector projects in Kenya, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy.

Associate professor of HSE, 10+ years - CIO in large holding companies, 5+ years - CIO in mining companies, main profile - development of Digital strategy and implementation of digital products, IT development expert, automation of manufacturing enterprises.

innovative director at “Avtodoria” LLC as well as founding ML Engineer at LogicYield LLC. With a background in technical sciences, my work focuses on the practical application of Deep Learning in heavy industries, specifically chemical and mineral fertilizer production.

Alexey Komissarov, PhD — AI researcher exploring what happens when we treat AI as partner rather than tool. Background in genomics, software development, entrepreneurship, now building voice AI agents that evolve through dialogue. In 2025, ran one of the first university courses co-taught with an AI voice instructor. Founder of stealth startups in human-AI collaboration.

Data science professional with 8+ years of experience applying graph databases to complex business problems. Co-founder and CTO of ClearPic.ai, developing tools to map business relationships and compliance risks in Central Asia and the Caspian region. Background in financial intelligence and consulting (Deloitte, PwC, Urus Advisory).

Executive Director of DS. Team Lead, Recommender system

Independent AI researcher focused on LLM-based agents and recommender systems. Currently leading the development of a GenAI-driven fintech solution at a startup. PhD, thesis in Graph ML.

CTO and co-founder of Celsus, author of the telegram channel "Varim ML"

Executive Director, Department of corporate architecture, Sberbank

Biotech research scientist, LLMs enthusiast

I graduated from the Moscow State University of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, the Department of MMP, worked at Yandex, and now I head the LLM at Avito

Dr. Alexander Kotov is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Wayne State University (Detroit, USA) and the director of the Textual Data Analytics (TEANA) laboratory. His research interests are focused on natural language processing and information retrieval as well as their applications to health informatics. Dr. Kotov received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011 and was a post-doc at Emory University in 2011-2013.

Physicist, solar power plant developer, Head of the Georgian Section of the European Association for Renewable Energy (EUROSOLAR), Deputy Director of the Institute of Materials Science at Tbilisi State University.

Leading Omani expert in AI and Digital Transformation with 23+ years of experience in ICT and a PhD in Technology Adoption (AI & DX). He serves as Director of AI Projects and Director of the National AI Studio, leading national AI initiatives in Oman. He is CEO of Maidaan Artificial Intelligence, a Global AI Ambassador, Certified Chief AI Officer, and Certified AI Auditor (ITU), with extensive experience in large-scale national AI projects across multiple sectors.

I have been in charge of Lanit's Big Data Artificial Intelligence Competence Center for more than 4 years. He has been working in data science for over 8 years. I've managed to work with all types of tasks and data.

Deputy Head of domain T1.Artificial Intelligence, Director of the Division of Data Analysis and Modeling, T1 company

Technical Lead and Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, specializing in Microsoft Office and its integrations with Copilot and AI-driven productivity experiences

Natalia Khanzhina, 13 years in AI, PhD in Engineering. Published 20+ papers at top-tier conferences. Founded a GenAI startup in France, which grew to 50,000 MAU.

Managing director of SVST Ventures. More than 15 years of diverse international experience in industrial technologies, high-tech entrepreneurship, corporate innovation and venture capital investing; strategy and business development. PhD in physics from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).

Pavel Kuznetsov, ML-developer, AI Center, Kontur. He develops AI features for the Kontur.Talk video conferencing platform.

Professor at National Research Nuclear University MEPhI

Alexey Kabanov, an AI and AGI enthusiast and a consciousness philosophy researcher, has been conducting research since 1995. By profession, he is a software developer and corporate IT systems architect.

Ph.D., Founder of Aigents, Founder of AGIRussia, Lead Researcher at Novosibirsk State University

PhD, Head of the Color Reproduction and Synthesis Sector at IITP RAS, Head of an AIRI research group, and Associate Professor at MIPT. Founder of EKSLi and AIVi. His work focuses on color science, computer vision, and intelligent automation. Author of 50+ Q1/A* publications and developer of the world’s first acousto-optic colorimeter.