Russian Foundation for Basic Research was established in 1994. Its main goal is to support fundamental investigations in various fields of science. Annually, the contest of scientific projects takes place, and the expert councils consisting of leading scientists in different areas, make their decisions on financing the most interesting and promising projects. In addition, the Foundation supports important national programs in prior fields of science. RFBR actively supports international scientific conferences in Russia.

The Office of Naval Research was established by the US Congress in 1946 as the first basic science research agency in the United States. Today, ONR sponsors a broad range of basic and applied research efforts in universities, industry, and Government laboratories, in the US and abroad.

Microsoft Research, a research division of the Microsoft Corporation, was founded in 1991 by Bill Gates and Natan Myrvold. Over the past ten years MSR has grown substantially and has contributed to almost every major product at Microsoft. Now over 500 researchers are working on a wide range of projects: artificial intelligence, multimedia, quantum computing, operating systems, programming languages and tools, signal processing, speech recognition, image processing, user interfaces, and more. Microsoft Research maintains four laboratories scattered across the globe.

xTech Ltd. is a Russian software development company, one of the oldest IT companies in Siberian region of Russia. The company was founded in 1992 by a group of researchers of IIS. xTech company works in the following areas of IT: business applications, e-commerce, Internet/Intranet applications, Web site design and development, databases, client-server applications.

The A.P.Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems (IIS) is a part of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The work performed in IIS now covers the following research areas:

• the theoretical background of computer science;
• methods and tools of constructing reliable and efficient programs;
• artificial intelligence systems;
• software and application packages for new computers, systems and networks.

The Institute consists of seven research laboratories and a number of supporting divisions, including the information service in the A. P. Ershov Memorial Library. There are 120 staff members in the Institute; 8 doctors of science and 30 Ph.D. holders among them.