Winners of ITMO.STARS on Their Experience at ITMO University

The competition is open to applicants who have passed the minimum Unified State Exam points threshold (in most cases, 60 points for each subject). The application process takes place from June 20 to 6 pm on July 29, 2021. During this period, participants should fill out an application in their personal account, and submit their portfolio and motivation letter. The contest committee will assess all applications and then invite the best applicants for an online interview. Winners will be announced on August 6. 

This year, Ilya Glebov, the very first winner of ITMO.STARS, is graduating from the university. While still in school, Ilya stumbled upon a vulnerability in VK’s security system and was rewarded with three thousand dollars for his discovery. Danil Zakoldaev, the head of ITMO's Faculty of Secure Information Technologies, offered him a tuition-free position at the university. This was the beginning of the ITMO.STARS competition.

ITMO.NEWS talked to Ilya and other ITMO.STARS winners to learn more about their achievements, plans, and experiences at ITMO University. 

Ilya Glebov, ITMO’s School of Computer Technologies and Control, Information Security Technologies – ITMO.STARS 2017

After I receive my Bachelor’s degree, I’ll probably pursue my Master’s in the same field. I’ve already successfully defended my thesis, which was devoted to the development of an intrusion detection system for containerized Linux applications. But I’ve not yet decided what I’m going to do next. I have lots of ideas but not a certain topic I’d like to explore in greater detail. I’m interested in web application security, network interactions, and the Linux operating system. 

Last September, the More Smoked Leet Chicken team and I won the VolgaCTF cybersecurity competition, and on July 18, we’re going to the RuCTF international competition.  I took second place at the competition dedicated to the opening of an international cybersecurity center and cyber testing ground. The task was to detect as many threats as possible using log data.

I did my internship about six months ago, and then got a job at Yandex where I’m engaged in the protection of services and user data. But I still want to learn more, meet new people, and stay in touch with the university and my teachers, as well. 

Alexander Blashenkov, ITMO’s School of Translational Information Technologies, Programming and Internet Technologies – ITMO.STARS 2018

In 2021, we won the Moscow Travel Hack for the second year in a row. There, we picked the task from the RUSSPASS service and created RUSSPASS ID, a unified tourist identification system for partner websites. Basically, we had to develop a service that transfers information to other services.

I also attended the Summit of Young Scientists and Engineers “Big Challenges for Society, State and Science.” It was pretty awesome! As for my studies, I switched to a tuition-free position and became a curator at the Faculty of Information Technologies and Programming.

Another achievement is my work at JetBrains. I’m responsible for the Ideolog plugin for their integrated development environments (IDE) with around five million downloads. Now, it has problems with UX and I have to find a solution. Also, after continuous work, I finally released a feature for sharing settings with JetBrains Rider. At the moment, it’s in public testing.

Lev Kobelev, ITMO’s Faculty of Infocommunication Technologies, Mobile and Networking Technologies – ITMO.STARS 2020

My academic year started with meeting the colleagues of Alexandr Kapitonov, the faculty’s head, who offered to develop a game together. It is a robotics simulator that allows you to go from a beginner to an avid crypto baron. Although not a new Cyberpunk 2017, this game is full of various pop and ITMO references. The prologue will be released sometime early this fall. 

Together with the Info Lab, I also launched the Game Dev Lab that offers a series of lectures with the goal of promoting game development at the university. First, we had face-to-face lectures with pizza and chats but then switched to the online format. Some of our lectures are available on the faculty’s YouTube channel. This year, we had amazing speakers such as Kirill Zolovkin, a senior game designer at My Games’ Allods Team, and Nikolay Kuznetsov, a game designer of Despotism 3k. All in all, we organized around ten events, and I hope that next year we will do as well or even better.

I quickly passed my exams in winter and had the time to participate in another project. This was an awesome city-building game called Make Your Kingdom. I mostly dealt with minor tasks, but coming up with a tutorial was a major one. We wanted to create an engaging tutorial so that users won’t skip it and could understand the game mechanics. I think we did a great job but we will know for sure after the game's release in late July. 

I was free on weekends, too, and Alexander Podrezov, the head of game design at My Games’ WhaleKit, was just looking for people who would like to help him with a new project. The Dungeons of Probability is a mini-simulator for game designers on statistics and probability theory.

Nevertheless, this year was generous not only in cool projects but also in social activities. For instance, my two classmates and I became runners-up at the faculty’s first hackathon. I also found a lot of new friends who constantly motivate me to get going. 

Alexander Dupak, ITMO's School of Computer Technologies and Control, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence – ITMO.STARS 2018

I became a silver medalist at the I am a Professional contest on robotics, received a special award in the Speed category at the Drone Team Games by MIPT, and won the Rosneft Robotics Hackathon as part of the team. 

Supervised by Alexandr Kapitonov, our team developed a special canvas system for the Gaka-Chu robot artist. For a couple of months, I worked at the ADL lab where I modeled and assembled a manipulator gripper for test tubes, and with the help of my friend, we managed to fix the algorithm. I also wrote a code for automatic positioning using computer vision techniques but it didn’t reach the testing phase. I was on a tight schedule and was exhausted, so I had to give up this project. 

I also joined a sailing club. I’ve already had the chance to travel on a boat and even lost my drone in the Gulf of Finland while I was filming the training of the club’s members. We even rented a boat and hired a diver but, sadly, couldn’t find the drone. 

Now, I plan to bring together all drone enthusiasts at ITMO and maybe organize an event for the Olimp lab and shoot a promo for ITMO using an FPV quadcopter.

Gleb Novikov, ITMO’s Faculty of Infocommunication Technologies, Mobile and Networking Technologies – ITMO.STARS 2019

During this academic year, I managed to create the Info Lab, ITMO’s largest community of developers with around 150 members, get a few offices, participate in various projects, even though not all of them got to see the light of day, organize a few IT events, and lose track of obtained grants. But now I plan to focus on augmented reality by taking part in related projects and hackathons and delegate other tasks to the members of my team. 

Last fall, I held the first web development school at ITMO called ICT.Bootcamp #1, which was followed by CT.Bootcamp #2 on Android software development in April. Around the same time, I organized ICTon #1, a hackathon for the development of Telegram bots and then, in spring, there was ICT.Hack #2, the second hackathon for mobile and web development.

I headed the IT field at the AEROSPACE-AGRO project and even won a grant of 3 million rubles from the Innovation Promotion Fund to create an ML-based image analysis platform for agricultural areas. 

I also won several grant competitions for the Recycling Starter project and even XLab’s competition for holding an AR hackathon, which will take place in the next academic year.

Alexandra Klebleeva, ITMO’s Faculty of Technological Management and Innovations, Innovative Entrepreneurship – ITMO.STARS 2018

So much has happened. I met new people, tried my hand at organizing events (even international ones), won two grants, became a project manager for the BBC1 cross-border cooperation, and now I’m working at the university’s Creative and Corporate Projects Planning Center.

It all started when I was offered an SMM manager job at ITMO’s Energy Club and then I happened to become its head. While organizing numerous events, I was invited for an engineer position at the School of Biotechnology and Cryogenic Systems. Now, I take part in the Russia-Finland cross-border cooperation program (Business in Biotechnology and Circular Economy) where we deal with environmental issues, help green startups, and so on. 

My robot artist that draws military-themed pictures helped me win a grant from Rosmolodezh. This patriotic project is on the display at ITMO’s Museum of Optics. We were also awarded a 250,000 ruble grant for the technology for processing blood into animal feed additives that we presented at the Tyreman competition. 

Ekaterina Mashina, ITMO’s School of Computer Technologies and Control, System and Applied Software – ITMO.STARS 2018

In September, I became a mentor of two groups of first-year students and started to access the lab work of four other groups. I also helped to organize the Hult Prize On Campus competition that took place at ITMO from September to early December. Also in December, I brought home two medals as part of the national team at a cheerleading competition.

After such a busy semester, I wished for a break but I had two reports (the relevant articles are now in press) to present at an educational and methodological conference. In April, I gave six presentations at the Congress of Young Scientists (six abstracts are already available online and the other six are being evaluated). Right after the congress, I took second place at the Lomonosov international conference organized by Lomonosov Moscow State University.

As sports got into full swing at the end of April, we participated in five competitions and won five medals. I also successfully passed a job interview and after exams, I’ll try myself as a backend developer at BIOCAD.