The three-day school included lectures by top IT specialists from Samolet, Lenta, and Novabiom, as well as the opportunity to work on projects in computer vision, data collection and automation, and AI under the supervision of Samolet curators. Among the projects were an automated onboarding platform, a service for splitting a restaurant check, and an AI-powered model that collects data about the infrastructure, district, and air conditions around residential facilities for rental listings. For that, students studied target markets, came up with use cases and development steps, planned the budget, and assessed costs and risks. The projects were presented on the last day of the school. 

“Samolet is a proptech leader that creates diverse IT solutions for all phases of the construction business and implements different product approaches. This collaboration will allow us to train IT leaders, not regular programmers, and develop and introduce new solutions into the market. At this school, we managed to show our students what it’s like to be a programmer – namely, the logistics of team work in low-resource settings,” noted Anton Kuznetsov, the head of ITMO’s Institute of Applied Computer Science.

A project focusing on the real estate sector and social media lead generation took first place. The team aimed to develop a system that automatically collects, categorizes, and transmits data about potential consumers who express a desire to acquire real estate on social media to the sales funnel. They believed that traditional ways of finding new clients such as advertising or cold calling are costly and inefficient, whereas social media are emerging as a new reliable data source on potential buyers. The project was created by students of the IT Team Leads Master’s program: Mikhail Pereverza, Alexander Zubov, Semyon Doroshenko, Danil Kostennikov, and Albina Makarova.

The winners received a 200,000-ruble grant from Samolet that they can invest in, for instance, computing power and domains for their projects. The project will continue to receive support from the company and will be brought to the ready-made product stage in the future. 

“Samolet Group is a corporate partner of ITMO’s IT Team Leads Master’s program, within which the school was organized. This program provides an opportunity to improve education quality, make it more market-relevant, and include company experts in the educational process. We meet with our students on a regular basis. For example, last semester, we introduced them to IT projects in the construction industry and discussed the specifics of teamwork in IT. The school taught students to present their projects, see them as products, and efficiently pitch their ideas inside an organization or to investors,” said Svetlana Nokhrina, the head of the youth programs development team at Samolet Group.

The school was attended by 50 students from ITMO’s Institute of Applied Computer Science. It was co-organized by Samolet Group, a development company that contributed to a joint corporate Master's program for future IT team leads at ITMO.