The main news story that resulted in a boost to ITMO University’s media ranking position is the university’s victory at the World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.
“The Public Relations Office of ITMO University did its best to make sure that our triumph at ACM ICPC remained relevant for as long as possible. Prior to the Finals, we sent out event information where we provided vivid explanations: the topic is not a familiar one for Russian mass media; few people understand what collegiate programming is. So we decided to draw a comparison between the Contest and the Olympic Games, and we ended up obtaining interesting figures. For example, the International Collegiate Programming Contest has actually gathered four times more participants than the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. Facts like these impress people. After the ITMO University team won the title, Russian mass media began publishing various materials: about the students’ victory; their meeting with Dmitry Medvedev, Prime Minister of the Russian Federation; congratulations given by President Vladimir Putin at the St.Petersburg International Economic Forum, and more,” - comments Ekaterina Boglaeva, Head of Public Relations Office of ITMO University.
Google’s announcement of Kotlin programming language as the official language for Android development is another major event that caused numerous mentions of ITMO University in the media. The Kotlin development team is led by the ITMO University graduate Andrey Breslav. As Ekaterina Boglaeva states, thiswas a milestone event for the Russian software market as it is the first time in over 25 years that a Russian software product received such acclaim in the global IT industry.
Two main aspects were taken into account to work out the media ranking: the MediaIndex - an index of the “Medialogia” system that helps evaluate PR efficiency; and the Citation Index indicating the number of information resource links in other mass media and assessing how influential the link-publisher’s resource is. The MediaIndex is calculated automatically by a system using a special linguistic analysis technology. The value of this index is defined for each mention of a university in the mieda. The higher the index - the better the university’s appearance in mass media. As for the Citation Index, it is calculated using mathematical-linguistic text analysis of 39 000 open sources.
Apart from ITMO University, four other Russian universities have made their first appearance in the media ranking: the Ural Federal University, V.I. Vernadsky Crimean Federal University, the Russian University of Theatre Arts, and the University of Tyumen. The universities ranked between 10 and 20.
The media ranking is formed based on the media database of the “Medialogia” system that currently includes over 40.000 media sources: TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, information agencies and Internet media. The ranking was calculated based on analysis of 150.000 messages
Translated by Ksenia Starodubtseva
