CHAMPIONS
For the seventh time, ITMO University's programming team became World Champions at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, which took place in Rapid City, SD (USA), setting a new record in the history of the contest. No other university has been able to win the Cup seven times. The team was personally congratulated by Prime Minister Medvedev soon after and later acknowledged by President Vladimir Putin during his speech at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
HIGHPARK
The long awaited start of construction of ITMO's Highpark campus was announced by the Russian Prime Minister at the “Open Innovations” Forum. The new campus, the name of which was also chosen by Medvedev, will become the largest scientific, educational, innovative and industrial cluster in the south of St. Petersburg. The city’s Governor was elected as the chairman of the board for ITMO High Park expanding the scope of the initiative even further.
THE
Times Higher Education rankings for the Computer Science and Engineering and Technology subjects were announced in October. ITMO University kept its place in the top 100 of the world’s best universities in Computer Science, taking 76th place! This was also the first time that ITMO entered the Engineering and Technology ranking.
ROADMAP
ITMO proved itself again as one of the most progressive universities in the country. It was placed 4th amongst the 21 universities participating in Russia’s 5-100 Academic Excellence Project after a dynamic presentation of our strategy and roadmap for the next year.
ROBOT
This was the year of robots. One after another ITMO’s robots took to the international stage. From Seldon, the red-haired singing robot who sometimes poses as a public servant to Forester, the robot that is saving the forest. Wirey-haired Seldon took 2nd place at RoboCup Asia-Pacific 2017 for his rendition of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” but the real winner was Forester who first won the national competition and then headed to Costa Rica for the World Robot Olympiad (WRO-2017) in November, where it took a gold medal in the Open Category’s Senior age group.
DOLPHIN
The online popularity of the Open Doors film led to winning a Silver “Dolphin” at the Cannes Corporate Media and TV awards. The slogan that ITMO opens doors, which became popular after the film, was then used for a special Russian Graduate Scholarship Project, which was launched this year, attracting international students from around the world to Russia to enrol in Master’s programs in Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, or Economics.
SOBAKA
Sobaka, the Russian word for “dog” is not only the animal sign for 2018, but also the name of a popular online and print magazine sobaka.ru which named ITMO’s team amongst the top 50 influential people in St. Petersburg, particularly in the area of science and life. That’s right, science is cool and ITMO landed in the “cool group” yet again amongst St. Petersburg’s finest.
