Evgeny Sokolov

The awards ceremony for the international Yandex ML Prize was held in Moscow. This year, all three winners in the ‘ML Educators’ category were HSE faculty members—Evgeny Sokolov, Associate Professor and Head of the Big Data and Information Retrieval School, Anton Konushin, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science, and Aleksei Shpilman, Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics at HSE’s St Petersburg School of Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science.

The HSE Faculty of Computer Science and Yandex Education are launching their first joint AI competition, Artificial Intelligence and Data Analysis Olympiad (AIDAO), for students from around the world. Participants will tackle challenging tasks in science and industry and interact with experts from HSE and Yandex. The winners will receive cash prizes.

HSE University and the Central University announced the launch of two joint bachelor's and master's degree programmes in the field of information technology. This year, the first admission to the bachelor's programme ‘Design and Development of Information Products’ will open with the support of T-Bank,the programme’s industrial partner.

The 18th Open Olympiad in Informatics was held in March at four locations; Moscow, Perm, Lipetsk and Tehran. The Olympiad included an online qualifying round and an on-site final round, which was attended by 435 schoolchildren from many countries, including Russia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Egypt, Georgia, and Germany. The event was co-organised by HSE University.

Dean of HSE University’s Faculty of Computer Science Ivan Arzhantsev, head of the faculty’s Big Data and Information Retrieval School Evgeny Sokolov, and junior researcher at the faculty Gleb Bazhenov took part in the China–Russia Seminar on AI Talent Education and Technology Development in Beijing (PRC). The meeting organised by Yandex was aimed at discussing cooperation between leading Russian universities and China’s Tsinghua University. The university is among the world’s best, ranking first in Asia and 12^th in the world in the international Times Higher Education rating.

HSE University has proved its leading position in the first group of the ‘Research Leadership’ field under the Priority 2030 programme. The university has also received the highest grant for teaching digital competencies to students, demonstrating its educational leadership in the fields of digital technologies and AI.

Every spring, HSE University’s Faculty of Computer Science, which this year turns nine years old, traditionally opens its doors and invites everyone to a festival. This time, more than 20 events with over 2,000 registered participants were held between April 8^th and 16th as part of the Days of Computer Science.

The HSE's Master of Data Science programme reached the final of the Digital Learning 2022 Award in the online programmes category, as well as winning the audience award. HSE was the only university to reach the final. Nominees from the world of business competed side by side with the first English-language master's programme in Russia implemented entirely online.

On October 23, the European Girls’ Olympiad in Informatics came to a close in Turkey. The Russian team, which included HSE University Faculty of Computer Science student Vladislava Sinitsyna, won two gold medals and two silvers. A total of 43 countries took part in the competition.

In April 2022, HSE University’s 'Master of Data Science’  Programme held their first online graduation ceremony in English.  17 out of the 48 students completed their studies with distinction.

Master of Data Science is Russia's first English-language master's programme delivered entirely online on the Coursera educational platform.

Professor Oleg Melnikov is among the international professors invited to work remotely with HSE University’s students this academic year. He lives in California, runs the Data Science department at a company in Palo Alto, and teaches at Stanford and other universities in the United States. At HSE University he teaches a course on machine learning for the students of the Faculty of Computer Science and the International College of Economics and Finance (ICEF), as well as a university-wide optional course, ‘Machine Learning in Python’. He spoke about his work in an interview with the HSE News Service.

As a student of the first cohort of the HSE Master of Data Science online programme, Alexey Babenkov not only gained new knowledge but also used that knowledge to find a new job.  He told HSE News Service how his online studies are organised, described the advantages of remote learning and explained which courses are especially useful.

Semyon Savkin, a graduate of Moscow School No. 57 and student of HSE University’s Bachelor's Programme in Applied Mathematics and Information, has won gold in theInternational Olympiad in Informatics individual all-around among school students from 87 countries. In the unofficial team race, Russia shares second place with USA and Iran.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Faculty of Computer Science does not relent and starts new projects as well as maintains the old ones. This spring, the Faculty and HSE International Centre for Research and Teaching started the advanced training courses “Methods and practice of Python programming teaching” and “Basics of machine learning for university professors”.

From March 17, HSE University has made all classes online. Here’s how the Faculty was able to do that, as well as celebrate Faculty’s birthday, talk to prospective students, and develop a new YouTube channel.

This academic year, HSE University will begin admissions to its new online Master's programme in Data Science, which will be offered on Coursera, the world’s leading online learning platform. The application deadline for admission to the programme is December 6. Courses begin in February. Upon the successful completion of the programme, students will receive a Master’s degree from HSE University, which is internationally recognized.

HSE's English-taught online specialization, ‘Advanced Machine Learning’, which was created in partnership with Yandex, became the first course in Russia to receive the Outstanding Educator Award in the category of ‘Innovation’ from the global online platform Coursera.

‘Introduction to Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science’ and ‘Advanced Machine Learning’ are English-language specializations, both created with the support of the top Russian IT firm Yandex, while the specialization ‘Introduction to Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science’ was developed with the involvement of the University of California at San Diego.

On August 6-11 the 34th International Conference on Machine Learning was held in Sydney, Australia. This conference is ranked A* by CORE, and is one of two leading conferences in the field of machine learning. It has been held annually since 2000, and this year, more than 1,000 participants from different countries took part.

An  app developed by the Faculty of Computer Science student team has made it to the finals of the Imagine Cup 2017, an international student project technology competition. Together with the other two finalists from Russia, the HSE team will represent their country at the international finals in Seattle this summer, where they will compete for the $100,000 main prize.