In the championship, teams had to choose one of the cases offered by big players on the Russian market. For instance, in the category Product Management, Alfa-Bank tasked students with analyzing the needs of its banking app’s clients and finding the balance between user convenience and business goals. In the case suggested by MTS in the category Data Analytics, teams analyzed how neural networks form their recommendations and determined the key sources of influence on users’ final decisions – as a result, the brand can more efficiently be integrated into new search algorithms. Student teams had two weeks to develop their solutions and defend them in front of a jury.
As a result, ITMO DevTeam won in the category Product Management and team Kron Dogs – in the category Data Analytics. ITMO students tried on the roles of IT specialists and product managers, gaining experience of working on real-world business cases and access to career opportunities from partner companies.
“None of us had participated in case championships before, so this was our first and successful experience. In the first round, we analyzed the replies of Yandex’s generative search algorithm to develop a promotion strategy for the P&G brand. We understood how AI engines aggregate information and what metrics they use to form user recommendations. Working with unstructured data was a separate challenge altogether. We also learned to build financial models, which is a handy skill for launching our own IT projects. In the final case by MTS, where we had to predict building height for radio network planning, we boosted our skills of processing spatial geodata and 3D map visualization frameworks. Instead of heavy-load, popular neural networks, we’ve developed a light-weight pipeline that works efficiently on basic servers and is easy to scale. In the future, this experience will be the foundation for developing complex products, as geoanalytics lies at the core of logistics, carsharing, delivery, and smart cities,” shares Arseny Fedorov, the captain of the Kron Dogs team and a first-year student at the Artificial Intelligence Technologies Faculty.
The case championship was organized by the platform Changellenge and welcomed students and graduates of business and IT programs aged 18-27 from various Russian cities.
