“Innovations Engineering: Technologies, Media, Art and Entrepreneurship” was the topic of this year’s MY.TECH Festival. More than 1000 people took part in the event, including international speakers and experts in the field of IT. For many of them, it was an opportunity to test their business decisions and share their knowledge with others.
About 20 companies presented their projects to the public. On the first day of the festival, the Prototyping Center together with 3DSLA.ru and the Diapol Company conducted a conference on modern additive technologies, during which they discussed how 3D printing technologies can be used in various fields.
A hackathon launched by the Safenet Engineering Center and Lenpoligraphmash was yet another platform for communication between developers and businesses. The participants had 32 hours to solve several practical tasks in such fields as blockchain, AI, IoT, and bioientification.
“Such events show that the government of the city pays careful attention to the development of new technologies. St. Petersburg is among the leaders when it comes to innovation”, comments Sergey Movchan, the Vice-Governor of St. Petersburg.
Among the projects presented by ITMO University were the Reabot hand glove simulator, designed to help people restore fine motor skills after a stroke, injury or operation, the MetaCoil wireless RF coil for MRI systems, the Laeneco stethoscope for lung diagnostics, the Bombyx educational 3D printer for kids, the Road Accident Solver project, and the Spetsvideoanalitika car identification system.
The experts from Spetsvideoanalitika presented a demo-video depicting how their system works: the system collects information about the vehicle’s identification number, colour and model. There are systems like that already, using a video camera, but the thing is that they don’t take color and model of the vehicle into account and don’t work autonomously.
“The system has already been launched into operation in one of St. Petersburg’s courtyards. We launched this project in July 2017. During the first two months, we made hypotheses and conducted customer development interviews. At first, we just wanted to create a car identification system for special vehicles, but this idea didn’t work out, so we made a few changes and came up with a new idea”, shares Nikolay Kulikov, the manager of the project.
The festival was supported by the Government of St. Petersburg, the Committee for Industrial Policy and Innovation, the RBK Group, the Strategic Initiatives Agency, the Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises, the University of NTI, the Skolkovo Innovation Center, ITMO University, the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, the Digital Economy NPO, Vnesheconombank, the Internet Initiatives Development Fund, the RTransInvest Company, and the Dipole Engineering Company.
