Both of the competition’s stages offered students applied AI tasks based on real cases from industrial partners. Out of 2,500 online selection round participants, 84 students (30 teams) proceeded to the finals.

There, students had to solve a computer vision task by Yandex Go: they needed to create an AI model that would check a car’s condition before a ride. Daria Ledneva and Timur Ionov have developed a solution that proved to be the most efficient and accurate. All teams had access to cHARISMa (Computer of HSE for Artificial Intelligence and Supercomputer Modelling), as well as Yandex Go’s database of 200,000 car images. The solutions, developed in 32 hours, were first tested with the Yandex.Contest automated system and then evaluated by experts from Yandex and HSE University.

“This win is an important step for my career – I’ve already added it to my CV. Thanks to this experience, I learned that I can apply knowledge from adjacent fields, such as recommendation systems and NLP, in tasks that are new to me. I enjoyed the element of creativity in the final task in particular – we worked not only on the engineering aspect, but also on the best way to clean and preprocess the data, as well as the ML architecture for our solution. I am currently progressing along two professional trajectories, a research-based and an applied one, and trying to expand my contributions to both. I do research in AI alongside building my career in big tech, where I am developing DS tools for business tasks,” shares Daria Ledneva.

All winners were awarded at Yandex’s Moscow offices, with the ITMO team receiving 600,000 rubles. Next, Yandex ML specialists will evaluate all of the winning models and their application potential, while winners will get the chance to join the team of Yandex Go.

At ITMO, Daria and Timur are students in the program Artificial Intelligence, where they work on cases from the country’s leading IT companies. Thanks to ITMO’s policy of applying ML in all research and educational projects, the university trains the best AI professionals in the country.