Summer Computer School “Data Science Dubna-2019”: summing up

Education, 17 July 2019

The Summer Computer School “Data Science Dubna-2019” ended on Saturday, 13 July 2019. The School was organized by the Laboratory of Information Technologies of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna State University, Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, the voluntary association “Center for the Development of Innovative Territorial Clusters in Dubna” with the participation of the Special Economic Zone “Dubna” and the Consortium “IT-education – XXI century”.

The School started on Saturday, 6 July, and its grand opening took place on Sunday, 7 July, at which JINR Vice-Director Richard Lednický, Deputy Head of the Dubna Administration on Education and Housing Evgeny Stein, Rector of the Dubna University Dmitry Fursaev and Deputy Director-General for Investments and Innovations of the SEZ “Dubna” Sergey Pisarev made welcome speeches. Director of VBLHEP Vladimir Kekelidze and LIT Director Vladimir Korenkov also presented their lectures.

84 students and 17 teachers from 20 leading universities of different regions of Russia (BSU, MIEM HSE, MIET, MEPhI, PSUTI, PSU, RNU, PRUE, NOSU, SPBU, TSU, Dubna University, etc.) came to Dubna in the pursuit of new knowledge. The 8-day programme of the School included lectures, workshops, round tables, a hackathon, presentations of IT companies, excursions, sports and entertainment activities.

The School participants listened to 18 lectures by famous scientists of Russian universities, national research centers and international scientific organizations, which covered the major topics of the School, namely, Big Data analytics, distributed and high-performance computing, information processing systems and data lakes for mega-science projects, methods and algorithms of machine learning, quantum and soft computing, digital transformation and modern IT education. Among the lecturers, the following should be noted: Avetisyan A.I. (Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, RAS Corresponding Member, ISP RAS Director), Voevodin V.V. (Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, RAS Corresponding Member, RCC MSU Deputy Director), Klimentov A.A. (Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, professor of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA), Smelyansky R.L. (Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, RAS Corresponding Member, ARCCN Director-General), Sukhomlin V.A. (Doctor of Technical Sciences, Head of LOIT of CMCF MSU), Chetverushkin B.N. (Doctor of Physics and Mathematics, RAS Academician, Scientific Supervisor of AMI PAS).

Workshops on machine learning, technologies of parallel programming on hybrid architectures and Big Data analytics evoked a vivid interest among students. They were delivered by the best specialists of LIT JINR and teachers of the Dubna University. The winners were chosen on the basis of the results of each workshop; they were awarded diplomas and prizes from “Tok Dubna”, one of the School sponsors.

During the workshops, round tables were organized for the participating teachers at which lively discussions on the following topics took place: IT education methodology, organization of online training, modern problems of artificial intelligence in terms of the digital economy.

Undoubtedly, one of the major activities of the School was the hackathon “Analysis of Big Data in Computer Vision” held together with the company “Videointellect” (Stadnik A.V.). An archive of video data consisting of daily recordings from different security cameras in transport was provided as a material for analysis. Students were divided into groups at random, and they were supposed to develop an algorithm for counting people entering and leaving the bus. The winners were determined on the basis of their presentations, the efficiency of the algorithm and the resulting number, which should have been as close to the real one as possible. They were also awarded diplomas and prizes from “Tok Dubna”.

In addition to the educational programme, participants had excursions around the Dubna University, where the prototyping centre and the laboratory of virtual and augmented reality attracted everyone’s attention. Participants visited LIT JINR where they saw the “Govorun” supercomputer, VBLHEP JINR, where an accelerator complex of the NICA megaproject is being built, as well as the SEZ “Dubna”, where the main companies of the IT cluster are located.

According to the results of all School activities, the best students were chosen. They received invitations to the 27th International Symposium on Nuclear Electronics and Computing (NEC’2019), which will be held on 30 September – 4 October 2019 in Budva, Montenegro.

We express our special gratitude to the organizing committee of the School and the volunteers of the Dubna University who did their best to hold the School at the highest level.

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