Two Russian ministries are expected to jointly create and help fund a network of IT-focused scientific and research centers at Russia’s leading universities, industry portal ComNews.ru reported last week.
The Ministry of Education and Science will lead the effort, while the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications will back the move by liaising with the national IT expert community.
Government tenders are slated for the next six months to pick 50 recipients of the annual 16 million ruble (about $510,000) grants for the creation of such centers. This is part of a five-year 4 billion ruble ($129 million) funding program that provides each of the selected 50 with as much as 80 million rubles ($2.6 million) per center.
Telecom and Mass Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov briefly referred to the joint project at a May 23 meeting at his ministry, explaining that the endeavor comes within the focal areas of one of the Russian government’s most recent broader-target funding programs adopted on May 8, 2013. The program is aimed at developing a new scientific cadre for the national innovation economy and fostering closer ties between IT companies and academia/research institutions.
“Specific areas” for R&D efforts in the IT sector have been identified, the minister said, giving no further details. According to ComNews.ru, those areas would likely include basically all IT-intensive segments, including robotics, computational linguistics, next-gen computer networks, quantum computing, automata theory applications and some others.
