On 31 May 2019, a regular regional stage of the international youth conference “Falling Walls Lab” was held in the JINR Visit Centre. The project was launched in Germany and was called in memory of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its aim is to provide international communication, an opportunity for the youth to present their ideas, scientific concepts, or to propose brand-new ways of solving problems in all spheres of human activities. A presentation should not exceed the time limit of three minutes and should consist of three slides. Winners of regional stages are given a chance to present their projects to the international jury in Berlin.

The regional coordinator of the project David Blaschke says: “I organized such an event for the first time in Wroclaw in 2016. Here, in Dubna, I have been regularly organizing two schools since 2004 jointly with the Helmholtz Association from Germany. One of the former presidents of the Association proposed to organize a regional stage of the conference in Poland. Then, as an organizer, I got an invitation to Berlin where the main stage took place on the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was a wonderful experience to meet world-leading scientists, Nobel prize holders, politicians, ministers, managers from various companies. And I thought that it would be nice to organize the event in Dubna. There are not only laboratories but also industrial companies, the Special Economic Zone, the University that can interact. A year later, in 2017, we organized the Falling Walls Lab in Dubna for the first time. Last year and two years ago, there were purely scientific presentations. In general, ideas that can positively influence human life are given a priority. This year, the main emphasis was made on ecology, energetics, medicine, and it excellently corresponds to the goal of the Falling Walls Lab.”

The Dubna stage of the conference was organized by JINR, the AYSS, and the University “Dubna”. Young JINR scientists, students and post-graduates of the Dubna University, universities and scientific centres of Moscow, Kazakhstan, Turkmenia took part in the conference. In particular, there were participants from MEPhI and the Bauman MSTU. “This event is world-known,” representative of the organizing committee A. Friesen explains. “These participants came to us in the following way: they submitted their applications for participation in Moscow but were not selected due to this or that reason. We had vacant positions and invited them. I think they found information about a regional stage in Dubna on our website.”

The jury was represented by BLTP Leading Researcher David Blashke, Director of the Alikhanyan National Laboratory Ani Apramyan, Head of the Academic Mobility Centre of the Dubna University Alena Voinova, JINR Vice-Director Richard Lednický, LIT Scientific Secretary Dmitry Podgainy, LRB Scientific Secretary Igor Koshlan, BLTP Researcher Alexandra Friesen, Chairman of the AYSS Council Alexander Verkheev.

Eight reports were presented. This year, all of them were devoted to applied science, ecology, new energy sources. Competitors reported on recycling of new year trees, creation of power supplies, new technologies in the oil and gas sector, as well as the application of IT technologies.

“Nowadays, we need to teach the neuron net to carry out the semantic analysis of the text. It should be taught using some data,” Stanislav Matkov from the Dubna University, ISAM, explains his work. “The data is specially prepared by a human. This process is very expensive, and there are no guarantees that a human would not make a mistake… The semantic analysis is carried out in a particular field, i.e. the neural net can recognize the text on only social, political topics, or only legal cases. I propose to exclude humans from this process for the training data to be formulated by itself, automatically or using a context. Now, I work on the algorithm of the semantic analysis, automated separation of the initial data. I trained my own neural net; it achieved the level of 66,3 % F1 (metric to evaluate of work of the neural net). And now I set parameters in such a way as to achieve the best results and make the neural net more or less industrial.”

“We work on nanotubes,” Assel Nazarova comments her cooperation with FLNP. “We want to use them as liquids that will transport antitumor pills. We know that these pills have a negative influence as well; for example, they cause hair fall, problems with a stomach, there may be a lot of side effects. That is why pills should be transported directly to cancer cells. The aim of my work is to place pills in nanotubes and transport them in such a way as it will impact particularly cancer cells and will not interact with live, healthy cells in any way.”

Winners of the Dubna regional stage of the competition: 1st place – Ksenia Scherbakova, 2nd place – Assel Nazarova, 3rd place – Meir Erdauletov.

“The final stage will be held on 8 November in Berlin,” D. Blaschke says. “The jury will select the best three presentations out of 100, and they will be presented on the next day in the frames of the Falling Walls Conference to prominent scientists, politicians, businessmen, economists. And we hope that our winner Ksenia Scherbakova (the Ordzhonikidze Russian State Geological Prospecting University) with her report on the emission of carbonic dioxide will get this chance.”

Galina Myalkovskaya, JINR Weekly Newspaper
photos by Igor Lapenko