University
Last week brought us some long-awaited news: the names of winners of the latest open call for projects, conducted within ITMO University’s 2030 Development Strategy. Now, 11 project teams will receive generous funding to bring their ideas to life. From practical (health sensors and digital assistants) to theoretical (dark matter candidates), these projects will aim to push the boundaries of scientific ability and knowledge.
Read more: Frontier Research: ITMO to Support 11 New Projects Within Federal Program Priority 2030
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What does the future hold for educators in the age of ChatGPT? Turns out, the prospects may not be so grim – as long as one knows how to adapt to the times. At a discussion during the latest Congress of Young Scientists, experts in tech and education gave their hottest takes on the upsides and downsides of AI-assisted education.
Read more: Insights from Congress of Young Scientists: Educating AI Natives to Avoid AI Temptations
Science…
In a rather poetic turn, physics researchers from ITMO have achieved control over utter chaos. Their recent study, conducted jointly with colleagues from the Institute for Problems in Mechanical Engineering, posits a handy new way to generate truly random noise, which is used for a variety of applications such as data encryption or medical imaging.
Exploiting the unstable nature of flow within a layer of liquid crystals, they’ve trained a neural network to convert the motion into data – and even adjust the output depending on the needs of each particular use case.
Read more: Classification From ITMO To Help AI Generate Random Noise on Request
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Ask a comic book fan and they’ll tell you that the times of handwavy explanations for their favorite heroes’ abilities are long gone: nowadays, everyone from Batman to Spider-Man is grounded in real science – or, at least, as close to real science as you can get. So, just how real is it? ITMO.NEWS recently chatted with School of Physics and Engineering head Pavel Belov about the most common fictional superpowers, from telekinesis to invisibility, to find out whether they could soon become real – and how.
Read more: Real-Life Superheroes: A Scientific Take on Superpowers
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Move aside, SDG – there’s a new acronym in town. ESG, or environmental, social, and governance, refers to an increasingly popular approach to doing business while caring for the planet’s well-being. What’s the difference? Master’s student Angelina Gruzdeva breaks it down in her blog post for ITMO.NEWS.
Read more: Blogs What Is ESG, and Why Is It Important?
…and art
Even some 60-70 years since its emergence, science art remains an unexplored frontier of interdisciplinary creation. This is especially the case for areas where it has, for various historical reasons, struggled to gain a foothold in the past.
For Chilean researchers and ITMO Fellows Marcelo Velasco and Ignacio Nieto, this was one of the reasons for their collaboration with ITMO’s Art & Science Center. Recently, they came to St. Petersburg to deliver a course and participate in a study of unique Latin American flora. They also sat down with ITMO.NEWS to discuss their fascinating new study and talk about the past, present, and future of science art in Latin America.
