Highlights of 2019, illustrated

His sixth win at Google Code Jam, third win at Facebook Hacker Cup, and a rare double win at Topcoder – this year, ITMO student and two-time ICPC winner Gennady Korotkevich has once again run the gamut of the world’s top coding competitions. And he also got himself a dog – a prize statue from Sobaka.Ru magazine, which has named him one of St. Petersburg’s Top 50 Famous People.

With every year, more and more international scientists, educators, and partners come to ITMO University to collaborate on research, deliver lectures, and attend conferences. In 2019, we met the legendary medical researcher John Ioannidis; the MIT professor Marin Soljačić, whom The New York Times chose as one of its 70 authors of the most “curious and inspired” creations; the Chief Editor of Nature Photonics Oliver Graydon; and many other amazing experts who now consider themselves as friends of Russia’s “first non-classical” university.

In 2019, ITMO University has adopted a new tradition – the scientific conference ITMO Open Science. The event, which took place at the Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, was unlike any regular conference. Young scientists, postgrads, and heads of departments shared insights into their work with exciting pitches, while heads of ITMO’s Schools tested their comedy mettle with an exhilarating Science Slam.

As always, our students have proven hard to keep up with: they won competitions, contests, and hackathons and received amazing grants and scholarships. But the fastest among them, in every sense of the word, was Klim Gavrilov, who won the gold medal at the FIA Motorsport Games. As he crossed the finish line at the Vallelunga Circuit in Italy, the ITMO University logo graced his car’s livery.

2019 was the year that put ITMO on the map of the international chemical community. One of the reasons for this was the 20th International Sol-Gel Conference, which took place at ITMO University, marking the event’s return to Russia after 48 years. Over 500 guests from around the world, talks by the world’s top-cited researchers, young science, and even stand-up: ITMO University raised the bar for any future host of the renowned conference.

Eighteen – that’s how many of our texts in 2019 were dedicated to ITMO University’s steadily growing positions in rankings both international and domestic. Especially notable is that our University is now included in several top-100 rankings: ITMO is ranked 74th in the THE Computer Science subject ranking and in the 76-100 range of the ARWU subject ranking in Automation and Control.

Our innovative new campus ITMO Highpark is under construction, but is already winning awards! In 2019, it was shortlisted for the 2019 World Architecture Festival Award and received the prestigious A’ Design Award.

To members of the University’s Youth Robotics Lab, the year 2019 was a truly “silver” year. These young enthusiasts ended up winning the silver prizes of the two largest robotics contests: Robocup and WRO. Igor Lositsky’s charges at the lab also introduced to the world their latest creation ELSA – a baroque robo-beauty who plays modern hits and all-time classics on her flute.

The United Nations deemed 2019 the International Year of the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements. Here at ITMO, we commemorated that in style by hosting the Mendeleev-150 conference. The event brought together the top chemists, physicists, teachers, and historians of chemistry from Russia, the USA, the UK, Spain, Italy, Germany, Israel, China, and other countries. Mendeleev would have been very proud.

“To show more than what may appear” may well have been the motto of 2019. And that is especially true for the staff of the Interactive Visualization Laboratory at ITMO University’s National Center for Cognitive Technologies, who crafted elaborate augmented reality shows at three major Russian and international events. First, they covered a whole stadium in rose petals at the WorldSkills 2019 competition in Kazan, brought myths alive at the European Games in Minsk, and unleashed the incredible duo of a very virtual Dima Bilan and quite real Anastacia at the ATP St. Petersburg Open.

Of course, this year would have been for naught if not for those ITMO scientists who began publishing their research in the world’s top-cited journals. There’s more publications than ever, and their quality grows with each year. What’s especially nice is that ITMO science has a very young face: oftentimes, the University’s PhD or even Master’s students excel as the lead authors of their papers. To us, it’s always a pleasure to report on these achievements. Our young scientist Anton Kozubov was the only Russian representative at the QKD Security Workshop in Canada. Meanwhile, Konstantin Zaytsev of the Computer Technologies International Laboratory was named as one of the top five young Russian scientists in systems biology. And the second year Bachelor’s student Irina Vorontsova joined her colleagues as one of the authors of a research article in the prestigious journal Scientific Reports.