Ural Federal University’s “Peak IT” Benefits Participants With Artificial Intelligence Learning
The annual “Peak IT” took place on the 17th and 18th of March at the Ural Federal University. The two-day event attracted over 2,000 participants, including students and pupils.
On the first day of the event, students visited an exhibition of IT companies. Representatives of the companies told them how to get an internship or join their staff. Lectures and workshops by experts in the field of new technologies taught them how to build a CV and start a career, as well as who are the product managers, team leaders, SREs and UX researchers.
“The IT industry is continuing to develop at an accelerated pace, and this would not be possible without a qualified staff. Top-class specialists can only be trained in a close relationship between universities and companies. An event such as ‘IT Peak’ is a contribution to the acquaintance of future employees with their employers. Every year, more and more IT companies are showing an interest in this event, so we will continue to hold such open days for the industry,” said Victor Koksharov, the UrFU Rector.
The idea of the importance of the event was supported by Mikhail Srodnyih, General Director of SKB Kontur. For several years, the company has been a general partner of Peak IT.
“We have been cooperating with the Ural Federal University for more than 10 years in the field of training IT specialists. Our aim is to increase the number of specialists in the region. And every year we provide support for Peak IT, a platform that brings together pupils, students, and employers. There is no doubt that such meetings are a contribution to the future of the professional community. For young people, it is an opportunity to find out about the prospects and development trajectories in the IT industry. And for companies, it is a chance to get to know talented young people who want to develop their IT skills in their home region.” Mikhail Srodnyih explained.
Participants learned about trends in the development of artificial intelligence and neural networks in a presentation by Denis Dimitrov, Executive Director of Data Research at “Sber”.
“Why do we need multimodal neural networks? Firstly, it is a modern trend in engineering and scientific thinking. Connectivism was born in 1940s, when machine learning and neural networks appeared and first experiments took place. In the early 2010s, the first big open source datasets for ML were created. BERT, GPT-3 and other pre-trained models appeared in the 2018-2020s. These models effectively scale to hundreds of billions of parameters. The efficient parallelism of transformers made horizontal scaling possible. This was the beginning of the race for large models and tensor supercomputers,” says Denis Dimitrov.
Artificial intelligence was also the main topic of the panel discussion. It was attended by Ilya Obabkov, Head of the UrFU Institute of Radioelectronics and Information Technology, Anton Loginov, Technical Director and Head of Operations Platforms Department at Tinkoff, Andrey Tarasov, Senior Developer of Machine Learning at “Kontur” company, Nikolai Domukhovsky, Deputy Director General of UCCS, and Oleg Artyugin, Executive Director of Data Research at “Sber”. They discussed the impact of artificial intelligence on education and business, and how it is being developed in Russia.
“There are several world-class teams in Russia. We have very impressive results in natural language analysis. For example, Yandex Browser has the ability to translate videos in real time. You can simply dub an entire video into an accessible language. There are teams working on so-called strong artificial intelligence, such as Sergey Shumsky. In another project, we have achieved success in analyzing natural languages, polygon analysis, building neural networks, and now the team can easily determine what text was written by ChatGPT,” shared his observations Nikolay Domukhovskiy, the UrFU Junior Researcher of Training and Research Center “Information Security”.
Oleg Artyugin noted that, in general, domestic development is still lagging behind the world leaders. However, it is a good repetition of the projects that have been created. The students were interested in possible threats to the development of artificial intelligence, which could lead to job cuts and employment difficulties. The result of the discussion was the conclusion that the power is in the human intellect, which is able to be the operator of the neuronet.
One of the main benefits of the Peak IT for the students was the opportunity to speak face-to-face with those who will be their employers in the future and to clarify what skills and competencies are most in demand. At the exhibition stand, company representatives talked about career opportunities and gave away many beautiful and useful gifts. They helped to make the day not only useful, but also pleasant.
On the second day, the 18th of March, there was a gathering in the main academic building of students interested in the field of IT. Representatives of the university told about the educational programmes in the IT field.