Yandex and HSE University Open Joint Laboratory

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The new laboratory will be part of the Faculty of Computer Science. The laboratory will focus on training professional researchers and conducting research in the field of data science.

Artem Babenko, Senior Lecturer at the Joint Department with Yandex, will head the new laboratory. Senior students who have already presented their research papers at IT conferences will work as research assistants. Applicants are expected to be proficient in coding and possess good knowledge of mathematics and research potential—the selection process will include writing a research article review.

The laboratory will conduct research in popular IT areas such as computer vision, natural language text processing and machine translation, crowdsourcing, machine learning, speech technologies, information search, and recommendations. The new division will work in close collaboration with Yandex Research. In particular, together with Yandex experts, students will be able to put their ideas into practice: they will try to teach Yandex.Translate a rare or even artificial language or improve the accuracy of recommendations in Yandex.Music and Yandex.Market.

Elena Bunina, CEO of Yandex in Russia

Yandex and HSE Unviersity have been partners in a variety of capacities for more than 10 years, and I am glad that we are expanding our collaborative relationship by launching a new laboratory. For us it’s an opportunity to continue contributing to the development of research. As part of the Yandex educational initiative, we have launched more than 30 projects and services, and student training is one of our priorities. We’ve developed Yandex Research, a research department that actively submits articles for A* level conferences—in the IT field, participation in such events demonstrates high quality of research (in data science, participation in A* level conferences is equivalent to publishing an article in a top academic Q1 journal- editor’s note). Together with the Faculty of Computer Science we will publish even more high-quality papers. This is a good start for young researchers and recognition of our level of expertise.

Ivan Arzhantsev, Dean, HSE Faculty of Computer Science

I believe that one of the main achievements of the faculty over the past six years is the fact that cooperation with Yandex, which co-organized the Faculty of Computer Science in March 2014, did not decrease, but significantly developed. Yandex experts actively participate in the creation and implementation of the faculty development programme, advise on student research projects, and teach at our continuing education programmes. The launch of the joint laboratory will help to actively involve the employees of Yandex.Research in the work of our faculty. Yandex researchers are unique experts who work at the forefront of science and are involved in creating the most modern technologies. It’s a great opportunity to be able to work on such a team at the beginning of one’s career, and our students will definitely take advantage of this opportunity. I have no doubt that the results, such as publications submitted for leading conferences on computer science, are bound to follow.