French Delegation Visits School of Business Informatics to Discuss Cooperation in Big Data Studies

In March 2016, the School of Business Informatics (Faculty of Business and Management) at HSE was visited by a delegation from France’s University of Évry; in late 2015, a student exchange agreement was signed between HSE and this university. The delegation brought 19 students from the Master’s programmes in the field of big data at the University of Évry to Moscow.

The main purpose of the visit was for the French delegation to familiarize itself with HSE’s Big Data Systems programme, as well as to complete a two-day seminar.

Svetlana Maltseva, Head of the School of Business Informatics, and Mikhail Komarov, deputy head of the school, gave the students a presentation of the educational and international activities taking place at the school, including the Big Data Systems Master’s programme.

‘The lectures and meetings allowed us to assess the interest of foreign students in our programme, and gave us a better opportunity to see the prospects for its development. For our students, it was a great opportunity to meet and share experiences with colleagues who are also exploring big data’, Maltseva noted. ‘It was very important for these meetings and discussions to identify concrete steps to develop cooperation not only between our two universities, but also greater cooperation in the scientific and educational area with French universities. In particular, we plan to hold a joint workshop on the subject of big data with the assistance of Russian and French experts on the basis of the Franco-Russian Research Centre’.

The same delegation also participated in ‘Electronic Business. Internet Project Management. Innovation’, an annual student conference where two groups of students from the University of Évry presented their projects.

During the visit, they discussed and planned expanded cooperation under the Big Data Systems with the aim of developing a double degree programme.

‘The University of Evry is an "Excellence Campus" of the University Paris-Saclay, which includes six Fields medals and two Nobel prizes. Because HSE and the University of Evry share the requirement of excellence, we expect from the cooperation to develop a spirit of achievement from our students’, said Marc-Arthur Diaye, Director of Faculty of Economics, Director of Master 2 Program ‘Innovation, Market and Data Science’ at University of Évry.

‘Our short-term objective is to develop a student exchange programme between HSE and the University Paris-Saclay. Our medium-term objective is to have a joint diploma in Big Data Analysis’.

Ekaterina Kalugina, who heads international relations for the Department of Economics at the University of Évry, has a personal interest in furthering collaboration between the two universities.

‘I graduated from the Economic Faculty of HSE in 2000’, she said. ‘To develop cooperation between the HSE and the University of Évry is not only a challenge but also a great pleasure for me. We would like to thank our HSE colleagues from Business Informatics for their enthusiasm and help in organizing our students’ visit this year. We have also started to discuss ideas for cooperation with HSE’s Faculty of Economic Sciences. We hope to continue the fruitful cooperation with HSE in different fields’.

Several students who took part in the delegation’s visit shared a few thoughts on their experience and on the development of big data studies in general.

Shuli Jola

In my opinion Big Data is a great tool to achieve optimized decision-making in a highly competitive and information loaded world. It provides IT architecture tools to deal with enormous quantities of data (i.e. Hadoop, all the tools in conjunction with it), as well as the necessary means to achieve smart data exploitation along with data management.

For me studying big data provides a new way of thinking and asking the right questions. I already have a Master’s degree in quantitative finance. Big data provides the industry with the tools it needs to step into the next generation; and possibly answer some of its dilemmas, such as microstructure problems.

Big data has already been successfully utilized in health care, and has achieved some interesting results. Predicting people’s health is a tremendous achievement in my opinion, as the postulate in medicine is to ‘prevent’ rather than ‘medicate’.

I was personally glad to exchange ideas and projects with other students in the field, as big data is not yet very popular in the academic level.

Our trip was organized to the last detail: a tour of the Red Square and the Kremlin, a visit to the centre of Moscow, an opera at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Music Theatre, etc. I found the city very interesting, and being a history buff, I was impressed to see for myself everything that I had only read in history books.

Baldé Amadou

Companies are now facing a type of data that requires better possessing power, more availability, reliability and that needs to be processed very fast (sometimes in real time). This is better achieved by big data technologies.    

I am excited by the possibility of accomplishing more with new technologies and ideas. Better understanding people, automating more tasks and being innovative.

I came to Moscow to discover the HSE way, the culture and to gain more insights about the Big Data Systems Master’s degree... I found my Russian colleagues to very welcoming, warm and creative. 

Oueslati Hager

With the explosion of data, we are in need of sophisticated tools to manage all the unstructured data that are impossible to manipulate without the contribution from big data.

Renewable energy, finance, marketing and public relations are areas where big data have received some of the biggest results.

The seminar was just amazing; the people are great, cordial and the communication was very instructive.

The Kremlin is such a great place; I was really impressed by the architecture, which is very different from European architecture – especially the Cathedrals.