The 9th educational forum It’s Your Call! welcomed 132 Bachelor’s students from 20 Russian regions: Moscow, Voronezh, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, and Altai and Primorsky Krais. This year, the event was combined with the final stage of the I Am a Professional contest: the finalists of the tracks Programming & IT and Information & Cybersecurity defended their projects at the forum. These tracks are curated by ITMO; the general partner is Sberbank. 

Winners of the Roboschool by Sberbank and ITMO – new educational format for Bachelor’s students across the country – made their debut at the forum, as well. Back in February, the school’s participants spent a week attending lectures and workshops in robotics, AI, control and navigation systems, electric and power engineering, and digital products before they had the chance to complete the final team cases in robotics at the forum. 

“Robotics is growing into a large interdisciplinary industry where you no longer can excel at one area and expect to succeed. You’re expected to have a good command of engines, control systems, navigation, data, and AI and, most importantly, know how to apply all this knowledge in working systems. For that reason, we teamed up with Sberbank’s Robotics Center and ITMO to launch our Roboschool and give our students a chance to continue their training on-site afterwards. The school helped students see how modern robotics works: they worked with real-world engineering tasks and design approaches that account for system behavior, performance, and energy-efficiency, and during the on-site format of the event, they were able to put these skills into practice,” says Olga Tsukanova, the managing director and head of Sberbank's Academic Partnerships Department.

Students also had the chance to meet experts from ITMO and major domestic companies. The finalists of the Programming & IT track learned more about educational programs by ITMO’s Institute of Applied Computer Science and visited VK’s office, while those of the Information & Cybersecurity one went to tour the office of the company Positive Technologies.

The forum concluded with a series of lectures by Sberbank experts. 

Humanoid robots to AI investing 

While an ideal humanoid robot is characterized as strong, lightweight, cost-efficient, and controllable, the reality oftentimes is very different. More powerful engines mean higher weight, drives can provide the desired torque, but change movement patterns and power consumption, and a jumping solution may not work well for climbing stairs or performing manual activities.

In this regard, Mikhail Kakanov, a lead development engineer at Sberbank’s Robotics Center and a graduate of ITMO’s Faculty of Control Systems and Robotics, explained why building a robot from the most powerful parts is not always an option: in his words, different tasks require different characteristics and possible trade-offs between strength, weight, efficiency, contralability, and versatility. 

Sberbank’s Robotics Center follows an approach in which engineers design hardware and control algorithms not separately, but as unified systems, and fine-tune their parameters for specific scenarios. If before, they could first settle on engines, add drivers, and do construction designs before they start on an algorithm; now, they start with figuring out what their robot needs to do and how to move. They can do that by analyzing target motions, model joint requirements, optimize drivers for specific tasks, and finally validate them in simulations.

In his talk, Dmitry Ermakov, the executive director of Sberbank’s Investment Business Development Department, shared how AI can make investments safer, more affordable and efficient. He pointed out that today’s market already offers several AI assistants that can automate and analyze routine trading tasks; there will be smart protocols for adaptive smart contacts, autonomous credit scoring, and automatic investing in the interim and a human-free autonomous AI agent economy in the longer run.

Takeaways

The finalists worked on product tasks by Sberbank – the general partner of the Programming & IT and Information & Cybersecurity tracks at the I Am a Professional contest. For the Programming & IT track, the algorithmic task was based on an NP-complete problem; this means that students could not obtain the right answer within the limited time in each test but had to suggest approximate solutions. The closer their answer was, the more points they received. In some cases, participants' answers managed to surpass those proposed by the tasks’ developers. 

“This year, we changed the format a bit and allowed participants to use AI when working on tasks. The tasks, on the other hand, were developed so that an AI-generated solution wouldn’t make any decent score, and therefore students had to make AI work: set limitations, add various algorithms, and optimize the technology. We believe that the future lies in a cooperation between humans and AI and participants showed that they are ready for this,” notes Anton Kuznetsov, the director of ITMO’s Institute of Applied Computer Science

As part of the database challenge, the finalists were asked to optimize a complex query under strict resource constraints – the best solution accelerated the initial query by more than 20 times.

“I’m from Rostov. I work as a ML and data analysis engineer and have recently taken up competitive programming, too. My friends told me about the I Am a Professional contest, and I thought it could be a great way to show what I really can and compete against students from other cities. There, I got to not only meet fellow students but also level up my professional skills: for one, it was useful for me to work on database-related problems as I have some prior background in algorithmic programming and optimization. If I win the contest, I can get into a top-tier university. I know that ITMO gives a solid IT education, so I’m now choosing between Deep Learning and Generative AI and Artificial Intelligence – I’m more drawn to the second one because it’s online and I start working,” says Kirill Zinchenko, a second-year Bachelor’s student at Rostov State University of Economics and a finalist of the Programming & IT track at the I Am a Professional contest. 

The finalists of the Information & Cybersecurity were invited to practice their skills on the tasks common for the IT security sector: in particular, they explored web service vulnerabilities, analyzed traffic, and ran reverse engineering and binary exploitation, including identified weaknesses in cryptographic algorithms.

Top teams in both tracks will be announced in May. Winners will be enrolled in IT Master’s programs at top universities, such as ITMO, on a tuition-free basis and receive a monetary prize of up to 300,000 rubles. 

Finally, the finalists of the Roboschool by ITMO and Sberbank programmed a robot to autonomously explore unknown environments and local specific objects. This function can prove beneficial for customs services, industrial inspections, search and rescue operations, and detecting abandoned items during emergencies.

“The Bauman University actively develops mechatronics and device control, but apart from engineering, I’m also deeply interested in robotic programming. So, I decided to boost my skills in this domain and apply for Roboschool. I was eager to visit ITMO’s robotic laboratories and learn about ongoing projects to map out some prospects for myself. I got a good engineering background at my alma mater, but for my Master’s, I’m looking at more IT-specialized programs – like Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at ITMO,” notes Aleksander Popov, a fourth-year Bachelor’s student at the Bauman Moscow State Technical University and a finalist of Roboschool by ITMO and Sberbank. 

Three teams from Roboschool were selected as winners following their project defense: the team No. 9 from South-West State University (Kursk), Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics (Moscow),  Dubna State University (Moscow Oblast), and ITMO University (St. Petersburg); the team No. 10 from MIREA – Russian Technological University (Moscow), Baltic State Technical University (St. Petersburg), St. Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation (St. Petersburg), and Novouralsk Technological Institute (Sverdlovsk Oblast); and the team No. 1 from St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University ETU “LETI” (St. Petersburg), ITMO University (St. Petersburg),  Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (St. Petersburg), and Ural Federal University (Yekaterinburg). All winners can be enrolled tuition-free in one of the sixth programs at ITMO: 

• Robotics and Artificial Intelligence;

• Navigation Systems for Unmanned Vehicles; 

• Systems Analysis, Control, and Robotics; 

• Digital Technologies in Manufacturing; 

• Intelligent Control Systems;

• Electrical and Power Engineering.