This year’s educational forum deals with trending topics in the IT industry: machine learning and neural networks, digital control systems in robotics, metaverses and competitive programming, startup entrepreneurship, and research. Lectures and workshops for the 100 top participants of I Am a Professional will be hosted by experts from ITMO and major tech companies like Sberbank, Yandex, and VK:

  • Dmitry Ermakov, an executive director of Sberbank’s department for digital technologies, will talk about personal AI transformations;
  • Anna Motoshkina, head of an interface development team at Yandex, will speak about ethics in software development;
  • Artem Kolosov, a developer in the Core iOS team at VK, will talk about memory leak prevention;
  • Vyacheslav Kovalev, a middle ML engineer and head of development of cybersecurity platforms at Sberbank, will explain how AI agents investigate cyber-incidents;
  • Maksim Kukushkin, a data scientist at Sberbank’s department for risk modeling, will elaborate on how the bank makes money from mathematics, economics, and AI.

During workshops, participants will be able to boost their hard and soft skills: learn how to confidently deliver public presentations, take job interviews, and solve problems in programming and robot control. Students can also take a ride on a riverboat and join the ITMO Family Day celebrations.

All participants will be invited to a case championship; here, teams will need to present a solution to a real-world case provided by the event’s general partner Sberbank. Together, they will develop a digital academic platform for inter-university exchange.

It’s Your Call! is an annual educational forum held as part of the national student competition I Am a Professional. Traditionally, ITMO University has curated three of the competition’s tracks: Programming & IT; Cyber- and Information Security; and Robotics. This year, applications to the forum were submitted by students from 49 regions and 19 universities of Russia. In 2024, the event brought together more than 100 students from all over the country.