Innovations and networking

This year, the forum welcomed 100 participants of the I Am a Professional competition from 19 Russian cities and regions, from Novosibirsk to Sochi. Together with experts from Sberbank, Yandex, VK, and ITMO, the participants delved into the most relevant topics in programming, robotics, and information security. Students learned more about machine learning and AI for IT specialists, digital control systems in robotics, metauniverses and competitive programming, launching startups, and conducting research.

During hard and soft skills workshops, students polished their presentation skills, passed mock interviews, solved programming problems, learned to control robots, and joined a business game.

“Thanks to our long-standing strategic partnership with Sberbank, we can create new interaction formats for the forum’s participants. It’s important that they don’t just compete, but also communicate: present their works and attend workshops on team-building and soft skills. This environment contributes to the development of useful connections and generation of new, especially interdisciplinary, ideas. This interdisciplinarity allows us to explore frontiers that will be the reality of the future,” says ITMO Rector Vladimir Vasilyev.

A personal AI transformation

In his talk, Dmitry Ermakov, the executive director of the digital markets development department of Sberbank’s Technologies block, shared why it’s important to use AI at work and how to do it effectively.

Dmitry pointed out that today, one's knowledge of AI tools is already taken into account in a prospective IT candidate. If you can work with neural networks and know how to write a quality prompt, your chances of getting an offer are higher. AI can also help increase your efficiency in work and studies – you can delegate your routine tasks to AI and focus on more essential ones yourself. Moreover, neural networks are a great tool for navigating, filtering, and summarizing data from different sources.

Dmitry Ermakov offered the following advice to aspiring experts in neural networks:

• Start by mastering one tool for a specific task;
• Create an environment where it will be easy for you to use AI tools: bookmark the relevant link or download the app and put it on your home screen;
• Incorporate AI rituals. To practice writing prompts, you can use AI to make your to-do lists every morning;
• Find a buddy who you can share your experiences – or even compete – with;
• Learn to make your prompts as clear and specific as possible. Without a good prompt, it’s impossible to get quality results from an AI;
• Be patient. You won’t succeed on your first try, but you will need to be persistent;
• Be critical and ethical. All AI-generated information has to be verified and critically evaluated; you also always have to indicate if you created something with AI.

When working with all kinds of technologies, it’s important to keep growing, constantly. As AI keeps advancing, it’s important to advance with it.

Ethical software development

Technologies permeate our lives: we use apps to get health tips, manage our homes, and even make documents. In this regard, Anna Motoshkina, the head of Yandex’s UI development group, shared why empathy when considering a user’s path is important in product development.

Ethics is not only about user emotions, but also about retaining their loyalty, as well as protecting the company’s reputation and staying within the law.

Anna outlined several rules that will help avoid negative consequences:

• When developing software, collect only the necessary data and inform users about how it will be used and stored;
• Protect user data and provide access to it only to a small number of people;
• Develop ethical algorithms that do not violate human rights or offend social groups;
• Do not trust algorithms with making critical decisions;
• Provide options for users with disabilities;
• Optimize the application’s performance by minimizing the resources required for development and use of the product.

Memory leaks and how to fight them

Artem Kolosov, a developer from the iOS infrastructure at VK Tech, discussed the technical aspects of IT product development. He talked about memory leaks in iOS apps, why they are important to eliminate, and how to do it quickly and efficiently.

A memory leak is the presence in the device’s memory of an object that, according to the logic of the running process, should not be there. These leaks can cause the application to function incorrectly and consume more RAM on the device. This leads to “cold starts” and fewer people end up using the product.

To efficiently tackle leaks in a team, Artem suggests creating a “queue” of those responsible for eliminating them. First, comes a volunteer or an expert in the field, next – the one who made the most recent mistake, and so on. This will help create a clear algorithm within a team, distribute the resources, and allow for a way for the most frequent mistake-makers to learn to do things right.

From theory to practice

Having worked with the experts, the participants presented their solutions for a task they were provided by Sberbank: to create a prototype of a digital academic exchange platform. At the moment, students wishing to go on academic exchange have to search for information about educational tracks on dozens of different websites. The solution is supposed to help students automate this search, collect all data on a single platform, and establish communication between exchange students and university representatives.

The participants worked on the case in teams. In just one day, they had to develop and describe the platform’s functionality, determine methods, algorithms, and AI solutions to optimize user scenarios, or even present an interface design and a prototype of the software architecture. They also had to implement an MVP of the service and assess the risks of bringing it to market.

All projects were evaluated by experts from Sberbank and ITMO, including Dmitry Dolmatov, a development engineer at the IT division of Sberbank’s Well-Being Department; Andrey Balkansky, a lecturer at ITMO’s Faculty of Software Engineering and Computer Systems; and Sanzhar Mukhamedzhanov, a researcher at ITMO’s Faculty of Secure Information Technologies. The experts evaluated eachsolution’s level of innovation, the readiness of the idea, its implementation prospects, as well as the overall presentation.

The best project was authored by team No. 4 (Tomsk, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and Vesyegonsk). They presented the most detailed plan of the technical aspects of development: frontend and backend solutions for the platform, including an automated system for educational program recommendations based on the BERT language model.

“The main thing was to organize teamwork effectively so that everyone focused on what they are really good at. Our team was made up of people from different universities, which allowed us to look at the project from completely different perspectives – to notice things that are usually overlooked. While working on the project, we shared knowledge and experience with each other. Getting to know new people and engaging in active communication is the most valuable part of participating in such forums,” shared Viktoria Popova, a member of the winning team and a student of ITMO’s Information Technologies and Programming Faculty.

Team No. 3 (St. Petersburg, Moscow, Saratov, and Krasnodar) came second, while team No. 9 (Moscow, Perm, and Yekaterinburg) took up the third spot.

During the recent ITMO Family Day festival, winners of the case championship took to the stage, where they received internships offers and prizes from the forum’s general partner, Sberbank.