In the Media
Smart Technologies in Food Production
📅 30 April 2026 📰 Ana Tili (anatili.kazgazeta.kz)
The national Kazakh-language newspaper Ana Tili published an interview with project leader Gulshat Amirkhanova about the Open Egiz platform — Kazakhstan's first domestic open-source digital twin platform, developed at the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data of Al-Farabi KazNU and now in pilot industrial operation. The platform combines IIoT data acquisition (19 energy-monitoring nodes based on ESP32 and Raspberry Pi, climate sensors, Saiman meter integration, MQTT with AES-GCM encryption), machine learning for load forecasting and anomaly detection (LSTM, SARIMA, Prophet, Isolation Forest, DBSCAN), and an interactive real-time 3D visualization of the production floor. The system is currently deployed at a bread factory near Almaty, monitoring energy consumption and climate parameters of the baking line and forecasting loads and production schedules. The core architecture is protected by 10 invention patents and 12 copyright certificates.
KazNU Launches a Telegram Bot That Turns Photos into 3D Models
📅 31 March 2026 📰 Gov.kz (Ministry of Science and Higher Education, RK)
The official government portal Gov.kz reported on a Telegram bot developed by the DigitalEgiz laboratory at the Faculty of Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence of Al-Farabi KazNU, which converts any photograph into a 3D model in just a few minutes. Originally built to speed up the team's own engineering work on digital twin projects, the tool is now available free of charge to students and faculty for educational and practical use. The service runs on ASUS Ascent GX10 hardware powered by the NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell chip: the system estimates an object's volume from a single image and fully reconstructs its shape. According to project leader Gulshat Amirkhanova, after internal testing the tool is recommended for interdisciplinary projects — for engineers, media specialists and natural science researchers, not only IT specialists. The bot is available at @img_2_3d_bot and is currently running in test mode.
KazNU Experience in Istanbul: Bridging the Industry 4.0 Technology Gap
📅 12 December 2025 📰 Yorick.kz
The Kazakhstani media outlet Yorick.kz covered the advanced training program completed by researchers and students of the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data at Bahçeşehir University (BAU), Istanbul, on 27 November – 2 December 2025. The program, "Optimization of Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Using Digital Twins: Integration of AI and IIoT," combined digital twin theory with hands-on use of modern LLM tools such as Gemini and Claude Code as engineering "co-pilots" for code generation and architecture design. Participants audited their current project architecture, explored synthetic data generation for training neural networks on imbalanced industrial data, and visited the BAU IoT Laboratory to work with IoT gateways and industrial protocols (MQTT, OPC UA). The visit concluded with preliminary agreements on joint publications in Q1–Q2 journals and future research collaboration.
Digital Twin of a Bread Factory — How Al-Farabi KazNU Is Building Smart Manufacturing
📅 13 October 2025 📰 DKNews.kz
The international news agency DKNews.kz featured our project "Development of a Digital Twin of a Food Industry Enterprise Using Artificial Intelligence and IIoT Technologies" (Grant No. BR24992975). In the interview, project leader Gulshat Amirkhanova explains how the team is creating a live, data-driven virtual copy of a local bread factory, from IIoT sensors to a real-time monitoring dashboard. Key results include production scheduling optimization with constraint-based algorithms, which significantly reduced total production time on a real order. The project involves Siemens as a technology partner, engages bachelor's, master's and PhD students, and builds international ties with the University of Birmingham, the University of Nottingham, Loughborough University and the SmartParc food innovation park in the UK. The developed architecture is planned for release as open source, making it freely available to enterprises across Kazakhstan.
Digital Twin — an Innovation in Kazakhstan's Food Industry
📅 29 September 2025 📰 Yorick.kz
Yorick.kz published an article by project leader Gulshat Amirkhanova about the project "Development of a Digital Twin of a Food Industry Enterprise Using Artificial Intelligence and IIoT Technologies," in which the team is building a digital twin of a local bread factory as a practical step toward Industry 4.0. The article explains the digital twin concept and its four-layer architecture — physical asset, data transmission (IIoT), virtual model, and interface — and presents the project's hybrid approach: Siemens Plant Simulation for production scenario modeling, with the twin's core built on open-source components (Mosquitto, Eclipse Ditto, InfluxDB, Grafana). Among the first results is production scheduling optimization using Constraint Optimization algorithms (Google OR-Tools), which demonstrated a substantial reduction in total production time on a real order. The developed architecture is planned for release as open source, making it freely available to enterprises across Kazakhstan.