ABBYY Department at MIPT - 5 years of investment in Russian education

April 7 marks the fifth anniversary of the ABBYY department at the Faculty of Innovations and High Technologies of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. It would seem that five years is a short time, but during this time several dozens of specialists who successfully work in the company have been trained at the Department of Image Recognition and Text Processing. We will talk a little about why ABBYY decided to teach students on their own, and what exactly they were taught.
At different times, we used different approaches to the selection of developers - we hired very experienced programmers and graduates of leading Russian universities without work experience in other companies. Over time, it became clear that within our own department we will be able to train students much better than it happens in study groups that operate at ABBYY for programmers coming to us from outside. A serious scientific base, developed in the company, and good relations with universities allowed us to open a department in MIPT in 2006.

Why MIPT? First of all, most of the top managers of ABBYY are graduates of this particular university and in the company, in principle, there are a lot of physics and technology workers, both graduates and students. Secondly, in MIPT they give system education, learn to study, research and think - for us it turned out to be the most suitable basis for creating our own department. The system of education at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology is built in such a way that basic knowledge is given at junior courses, and senior students are distributed to different specialized areas (basic departments). Previously, students combined work with us and study in other departments - it was very difficult and inconvenient for them. When the ABBYY department appeared, students began to write their research papers on the topics they were engaged in at work. This turned out to be convenient for students and useful for the company.

Students are admitted to the department starting from the third year of study, first to the undergraduate degree and then to the magistracy. The bachelor's courses include courses in software engineering, fundamentals of creating graphical user interfaces, architecture of modern computers and operating systems, development of distributed and client-server applications, and in magistracy, Algorithms and Data Structures, Intelligent Systems , “Artificial Intelligence” and “Designing User Interaction”. We are trying to ensure that the curricula of the department were at the highest level, so they are regularly reviewed. For example, this academic year we have several new subjects - “Compilation Theory”, “Logic and Modeling Reasoning”, “Design and Analysis of Algorithms”, “Linguistic Basics of Automatic Text Processing”. Both ABBYY leaders and invited professors — representatives of the academic community — conduct classes (so that students can correctly combine theory and practice in their heads). We also created interesting conditions for teachers, but this is a topic for another discussion.
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ABBYY Director of Linguistic Studies, Vladimir Selegay, gives a lecture as part of the Linguistic Basics of Automatic Text Processing course.







The opening of the department at MIPT allows us not only to help "our" students. Our goal is to make at the FIVT (Faculty of Innovations and High Technologies) the best teaching of Computer Science in Russia. In the undergraduate courses, our employees conduct subjects common to the entire faculty - “Introduction to Programming”, “Algorithms and Data Structures”, “Databases” We hope that in this way we contribute to the improvement of education in our country. To achieve the same goal, we are making efforts to improve the school curriculum in computer science, because in recent years the level of applicants who come to universities in specialties related to IT has fallen dramatically.

But back to the department. For five years, about fifty people have enrolled in it, some have already received diplomas, now we have 25 students studying. After graduation, you can work at ABBYY, but graduates are not bound by any obligations towards the company - you can get a job in another place. But, as a rule, at the 5-6 courses already all the students work with us, and sometimes they begin to do it before. Now ABBYY employs 15 graduates of the department and another 15 children who are still studying.

Students of the department and graduates work in various departments of the company. As we have said above, the topics of students' research works, as a rule, are closely related to the topics of their work. Therefore, the majority of children take part in the work of the technology development department - all scientific research is carried out there. Some students are even involved in the work on our new product - Compreno (we wrote about it here ). Graduates work both in the technology department and in all product teams - FineReader, Lingvo, Data Capture, SDK, mobile platforms. Among them are both developers and representatives of other specialties - testers, analysts, patent writers, and even specialists in online sales or HR. The knowledge gained at the department helps to move up the career ladder: now in the sixth year there are two students who have already become team leaders - one of them directs the testers FineReader, the other - online sales of products for mobile platforms.

How to get to the department? Recruitment at MIPT takes place once a year, every spring. All comers are going to a large stream of audiences, ABBYY CEO Sergey Andreev talks about the company and the department, and then gives the students to solve problems. Some such:

1. Words are given in the related languages ​​Quenya and Sindarin and their translations into Russian in a confused manner.

dunadan, beraid, edain, arani, nunatani, orod, atan, barad, erain

man of the west, tower, people, kings, man, towers, people of the west, mountain (one of the words in Quenya means the same thing as one of the words in Sindarin).

Set the correct translations of all given words. What does oron mean for quenya?

Name the Russian word that translates equally into Quenya and Sindarin.

2. Given a positive integer n (possibly very large, for which the arithmetic of long numbers is used). Find the maximum number k whose square is less than n. It is required to write a program that works as quickly as possible (it is desirable to further estimate the time of the program). We believe that the speed of operations on numbers depends on the length of these numbers.


For comparison: these tasks are a bit more complicated than those we give to solve when applying for a job in a company, but students are not required to definitely solve everything correctly, the main thing is to demonstrate unconventional thinking and correct ideas. When enrolling in both undergraduate and graduate tasks, the tasks are the same, since the students acquire the basic knowledge necessary to solve them in the first two courses of the Physics and Technology Institute.

After solving the problems, students communicate with our employees and tell them that they are interested in what they would like to do. This is not an exam, but simply a conversation “for life”. Those who have solved the problems well and have liked the interview, we invite you to talk with the heads of our leading departments.

We have no such concept as a competition for admission to our department, we are ready to take to ourselves and train as many students as it will show itself well. Students who have missed the set can write to us and be transferred individually, you can transfer from other universities.

This year the set will consist of two stages. At the beginning of May, the usual set at the Physics and Technology Department will take place, and in addition to it we will hold the ABBYY Cup online Olympiad (we will publish the announcement on Habré in May). Olympiad winners, we will be ready to take on the department after the interview.

In addition to the department, ABBYY has many other interesting initiatives for students. Recently started a project ABBYY Labs, which we will tell you in one of the nearest posts.

You can read more about the department of image recognition and text processing on the ABBYY website , but if you have questions, ask them in the comments.

Sveta Luzgina
Corporate Communications Service