Anyone wishing to meet new people could complete a simple registration process, choose an interlocutor, and meet them at ITMO’s booth in the Sirius Park of Science and Art. Congress participants could also choose to join a “speed dating” session, where they’d have five minutes to meet someone new and share each other’s contact details.

“Most of the time, scientists attend conferences in their fields, where they get to mingle within the community. However, scientific development is made by interdisciplinary research at the intersection of various frontier fields. This cannot be achieved by cold emails to other universities or labs – we need to know someone personally to understand them and their ideas and feel comfortable sharing ours. The more opportunities researchers have to meet each other, the more unexpected but beneficial are the results,” shared Maria Klimentieva, one of the organizers of ёTalk at the Congress of Young Scientists.

At ITMO, ёTalk has been available to staff and students for over a year – the congress is the service’s first exposure to an outside audience. The service was developed as a digital platform for university-wide networking. Any member of ITMO Family can access the chatbot, indicate their interests, find an interlocutor, and meet them for half an hour on a work day. With ёTalk, users can find collaborators for their project or people who share their hobby, plan lunch with an interesting person, or discover the workflow of a different ITMO department. A special version of the bot was created especially for the Congress of Young Scientists. In the common chat, users shared the bot’s main advantage: “Science calls for informal communication!”