A VSU team including students of the Faculty of Applied Mathematics, Informatics, and Mechanics and the Faculty of Computer Sciences will take part in the final of the international competition Atos IT Challenge. The team members are Maria Zhykhareva, Alexander Olferuk, Evgenyi Kashin, and Nikita Pokidyshev.
Atos IT Challenge is an international competition of IT projects and ideas held by the company Atos for students from all over the world in order to promote advanced technologies. The contestants are to suggest and implement a project based on a specific topic. This year’s topic is “Chatbots for people and business”.
Our students have been working on their project under the supervision of a well-qualified advisor for half a year and managed to get to the final.
“For me the most important thing is the opportunity to develop new skills, to upgrade yourself, and to use those new skills in a real project. And, of course, to do it together with you friends, your team. “Chatbots for people and business” is the topic we need to base our project on. “Chat” stands for conversation, speech, and text. Hence, we needed NLP (natural language processing) skills as well,” – said Alexander Olferuk. “They say that students learn better the night before the exam. We followed the same principle and decided to take part in the competition, although we’ll have to improve our NLP skills as we do the project. We can perform a simple text classification, but we’ll have to learn more about Q&A systems and annotation algorithms. We need to work hard, and I hope the results won’t be disappointing”. The jury will also have a tough time, as the range of suggested projects covers such areas as healthcare, recruiting, shopping, education, travelling, trading, and even bitcoins.
No other Russian team has ever managed to get to the final of such a prestigious competition. The winning team and two finalist teams will receive €10,000, €5,000, and €3,000 respectively. The award ceremony will be held in Paris.
