HSE & VK Engineering and Mathematics School Showcases 13 Projects at 10th Demo Day
The 10th Demo Day of the Joint HSE & VK Engineering and Mathematics School was held at the VK Moscow office. Students of the three workshops presented the results of 13 projects in the fields of artificial intelligence, information security, and digital platforms. Students worked on the development of recommendation services, systems for psycholinguistic text analysis and speech processing, methods for identifying celebrities in videos, algorithms for determining the toxicity of memes, security mechanisms for AI systems, and approaches to improving the effectiveness of neural network models.
Dmitry Kovalenko, Director of the HSE Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics, and Kirill Bogatyrev, Head of Project-Based Learning at VK, delivered welcoming speeches at the event. They shared their impressions about the school's development and the demand for its graduates.
‘The cooperation between MIEM and VK Education gives students of the Engineering and Mathematics School workshops the opportunity to work on projects using VK cases, which allows them to bring practical training to a qualitatively new level. As part of the project, students work as VK interns, and many of them continue their careers at the company,’ said Dmitry Kovalenko.
‘The Joint HSE & VK Engineering and Mathematics School trains strong specialists for the IT industry. We not only provide students with core competencies, but also develop systems thinking skills, an understanding of technology, and the ability to work with real products. More than 60 students participate in the workshops, more than 30 graduates have already joined the VK team—this is a clear proof of the relevance and quality of training,’ said Kirill Bogatyrev.
Students of the workshop on applied artificial intelligence presented the results of four projects, including: a system of psycholinguistic text analysis; VLMemes—a collection of datasets and an evaluation of visual-language models to detect toxicity, sarcasm, and cultural references; detection and identification of celebrities in video; and rapid generation of MCMC samples using neural networks.
Three projects were presented by students of the workshop for the safe development and operation of high-load systems: research on attack methods and protection of predictive AI models; a security monitoring tool for ML models and datasets; and the use of code constructs for k-anonymisation.
Students of the AI services and platforms workshop presented six projects: a model for noise reduction and speech reverberation; improving the efficiency of neural network architectures for sequence processing, including language models; super-resolution of audio to high frequency in low-resource devices; improving the quality of the speech signal for voice interfaces in noisy environments; attacks on large visual-language models; and ContextRank, dynamic social recommendations based on the integration of LLM and RL with the modelling of asymmetric trust.
New projects have taken their place on the ‘Project Tree of the Joint HSE & VK Engineering and Mathematics School.’ Since the launch of the initiative in 2022, a total of 52 projects have already been presented.
‘The level of students' training and the quality of projects continue to increase with each demo day. Workshop participants not only publish academic articles, but also speak at high-level conferences. It's nice to see how the school develops and gains new projects and ideas,’ said Fedor Ivanov, Director of the Joint HSE & VK Engineering and Mathematics School.
The event culminated in the awarding of certificates and memorable gifts to 24 graduates of the school workshops.
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