Meeting with President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Gennady Krasnikov

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: The Russian Academy of Sciences held its General Meeting today as a scientific session. Is that so?

President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Gennady Krasnikov Krasnikov GennadyPresident of the Russian Academy of Sciences : Yes, it took place as a scientific session and focused on ways the Russian Academy of Sciences can contribute to the science and technology development in Russia.

Vladimir Putin: Go ahead with your report, Mr Krasnikov.

Gennady Krasnikov: Mr President, I wanted to report on the Russian Academy of Sciences' performance. Here is my presentation.

Let me start by saying that the Russian Academy of Sciences drafts a programme for carrying out fundamental research. This effort includes the need to oversee and coordinate over 6,000 research projects in fundamental disciplines across 714 research institutions.

Every year, we hold a review to identify the most important outcomes. There are about 300 of them, and they take several volumes. You can see a summary here. We then send them to the Government and federal executive bodies. We also publish these achievements in the unified state information system, to the Science and Innovation domain.

I would like to provide just a few examples to clarify what I am talking about, since these achievements encompass all research domains. In particular, the mathematics department, represented by the Ivannikov Institute for System Programming, had a major task dealing with neural networks. This discipline has become quite popular lately, even though there are some fundamental challenges in this regard.

In fact, databases are used for training neural networks. However, if you change the database, the network has to be retrained too, which makes this mechanism expensive and time-consuming. We have done a great deal on this front. The healthcare sector offers an example of using distributed databases. Every clinic has its own database, so the training starts with transfer and contrastive learning, followed by fine-tuning. This is what produces fundamental results. This means that we do not have to retrain the network every time…

Vladimir Putin: Instead of starting from the middle of the field.

Gennady Krasnikov: Fine-tuning is a very effective solution.

Another fundamental achievement has been made at the Physical Sciences Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It is an optical atomic clock using thulium atoms. Its special properties allow using the clock to compensate for magnetic and electrophysical field errors. As a result, we achieve an extremely high level of precision, ten to the minus sixteen.

But the main point is that this clock is transportable, which means that we can send it into space. The current GLONASS system is only two to three orders of magnitude less accurate, but the use of the atomic clock will improve positioning accuracy by an order of magnitude. This project can be used to further increase the level of precision to ten to the minus seventeen or minus eighteen. This is an achievement on a global scale. It was made at the Lebedev Physical Institute.

Vladimir Putin: It is of major practical significance.

Gennady Krasnikov: Yes, that is correct. At the same time, it is a fundamental science project.

Another interesting project underway at the Department for Nanotechnology and Information Technology has to do with decentralised multi-agent collision avoidance methods for multi-agent navigation.

It is an effective tool to deal with swarms of drones or large groups of robots. It is not based on the centralised but decentralised control approach. In other words, it relies on local surveillance and communications, using unique algorithms for their interaction while avoiding collisions. Our analysis of this method has demonstrated its advantages over global analogues.

Vladimir Putin: This has remarkable importance for the target distribution.

Gennady Krasnikov: Yes.

Vladimir Putin: The distribution of targets among mobile agents. Excellent.

Gennady Krasnikov: Yes, this project has been completed at the Federal Research Centre Computer Science and Control.

The last achievement I will mention, although there are many more, was made at the Department of Chemistry and Materials Science. It concerns research into highly effective flexible perovskite solar cells [for space exploration]. Our space constellation is expanding and needs more energy. It traditionally uses silicon or gallium arsenide solar panels, which are very expensive, and besides, they degrade due to high-energy space radiation.

The perovskite solar cells are, first, cheaper, and second, they have the same effectiveness as silicon panels. Their efficiency is over 27 percent. Most importantly, they are over a hundred times more reliable because of their self-healing capabilities, which means they can repair defects caused by space radiation. This implies radiation resistance, indicating good potential for their use in space.

To be continued.