Today, business more and more often faces problems, which can be solved only by using cutting-edge technologies: by analysing large amounts of information, working with databases, predicting and anticipating customer actions and market trends. At the same time, IT companies often need help with it. For example, some calculations can only be done using the capacities of a supercomputer, which the region's private business simply does not have, but SUSU does.
The collaboration between the university and entrepreneurs has long been organized: joint projects are being implemented, laboratories are opening. Six months ago, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory appeared at SUSU with the assistance of Napoleon IT, which aims at uniting students into project teams for solving urgent tasks and problems arising when developing software products, as well as at teaching programming on iOS and Android mobile systems. Over the six months since its opening, more than 650 students have taken training at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
In this laboratory, a meeting between the SUSU Rector Aleksandr Shestakov, Director of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science Gleb Radchenko, the founder of Napoleon IT company Pavel Podkorytov, and Head of the "My Business" Centre Artur Yusupov took place on April 9th. The participants were shown projects on solving important business problems, for example, determining and setting a better price for a certain product by monitoring and analyzing the competitors’ prices. If earlier employees collected data on prices literally manually, entering them into the database and calculating the optimal, competitive cost, now it is enough to take a picture of the product and its price tag on the shelf: the application will automatically determine what is in front of you, how much it costs, add it to the database, compare it with competitors, and offer the most optimal solution. Despite the full performance of the neural network, its optimization and “tuning” is still in progress. This will result in a product capable of creating the company's pricing policy in real time based on analyzing the competitors’ prices.
Another interesting project is the Document Flow for SUSU web-site, which is being developed jointly with the Student Union. It is designed to significantly reduce the time of signing and working with documents. Now all the service notes are kept on one web-site. Users (SUSU staff members) will be able not only to track at what stage the document is, but also to sign it. The correctness of filling out the papers is checked by the administrator, who, if necessary, can “decline” a service note if it is drawn up incorrectly.
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“On average, the signing of one service note can take up 2 or more days. We want to automate this process and make it faster. Electronic document flow will significantly reduce the time for signing papers. With the help of our system, you will be able to receive documents ready for work already in 2 hours,” said Nikita, developer, student of group К-201 of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science.
The participants of the meeting also discussed the possibility of organising major, promising projects at SUSU. Thus, the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, jointly with Napoleon IT, are planning to develop a fundamentally new technology designed to adapt powerful neural networks to working on weak devices. According to Aleksandr Shestakov and Gleb Radchenko, SUSU students are able to cope with this complex task. The authors of the project want to develop a neural network and train it with the help of the SUSU supercomputer centre, and then begin to “compress” it so that even the weakest device could work with it. Such research studies, according to Gleb Radchenko, have enormous potential for scientific publications and further developments. The leaders of the IT market have already expressed interest in the project.
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“Now, two trends are actively being developed: the application of deep neural networks to solve a large number of applied problems, and the development of the Internet of Things and fog computing technologies, which make it possible to transfer most of the computing loads to the so-called “edge of the network”, devices that are located closest to the source of data. We want to run a really good, powerful neural network on these devices that could, for example, recognize images and data within a video stream. If we try to launch such a neural network now, then the resources of a low-power device may not be enough. In this regard, we need to conduct a compression of the neural network,” says Gleb Radchenko, Director of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science.
At the moment, major, international IT companies already exist in Chelyabinsk, which are in search of a powerful scientific, technological and expert base, since the creation of their own laboratories and the training of qualified scientific personnel is an extremely complex and resource-intensive process. In this matter, private companies tend to more and more often ask universities for help, as these have everything necessary to conduct research and develop scientific solutions to certain problems. South Ural State University actively collaborates with enterprises in Russia and around the world, and participates in the processes and tasks that a company seeks to solve jointly with the university.
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“The university needs to educate and train students on tasks, the solution of which will help our society and make it better. Often, these tasks come from the realm of business. Within the framework of the today's event, we have discussed the scientific component of this collaboration, because the development of serious software products and solutions requires very good theoretical training, which only a university can provide,” said SUSU Rector Aleksandr Shestakov.
However, the collaboration of SUSU and business is not limited only to providing of a scientific and technical base. Another important aspect is the training of highly-qualified experts who, immediately after graduating from the university, will have all the skills and competencies necessary to work in the IT field. Many SUSU students immerse themselves in solving real problems during their studies, gaining work experience with completed projects that can be demonstrated to the employer in the future. Despite the fact that the IT field is one of the most popular ones among modern applicants, “staff shortage” in the sphere of modern information technology can still be observed. Not to mention the specialists trained on real tasks.
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“Today there is a strong shortage of personnel in IT. At the same time, there are a lot of talented programmers in our region and in our country. The task of IT companies is to find these talents and develop them professionally; and the task of universities is to train talented students, to give them every opportunity to reveal their potential. Technologies are evolving very quickly today. And there are many examples when students got some skills, pumped them up and in a few years became experts and got a leading role in a project. There are many of such examples,” said Pavel Podkorytov, Head and founder of Napoleon IT.
During the roundtable, the participants discussed the state of the information business in the region, the prospects for its development and collaboration. Artur Yusupov, Head of the "My Business" Centre, noted the importance of conducting research and developments at SUSU, which could help enterprises in the region. The past year experience showed that even the most conservative enterprises were forced to go digital, adapt to new realities and partly go online. At the same time, the Chelyabinsk Region has all the necessary resources to create an IT environment in the regions.
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“I think that the scientific, university base, which is present in the Chelyabinsk Region, is extremely important. SUSU is an excellent platform and an excellent source of personnel, so that incredibly awesome IT companies would be founded in the region. And this is happening right now. Napoleon IT is by no means the only example of how large federal or regional companies grow from students with an idea on a regional scale. We have many entrepreneurs who go along a very difficult path, and we are proud of them.”
IT, artificial intelligence and the introduction of digital technologies into business: all of this has long been used in the modern world. That is why an open dialogue must be continuously held between scientists and entrepreneurs, in order to keep abreast, to have all the necessary skills and knowledge, to continuously communicate, learn and help each other. South Ural State University has become not only a communication bridge between the world of science and entrepreneurship, but also an important participant of it.