Education at the Computer Science Center: R & D and Practices

Computer Science Center exists in St. Petersburg for two years, this summer we will have the first issue. In this post, I decided to collect references to the students' impressions about the practices and research projects.

Research and practice

Research and practice in the center are positioned as integral parts of the training. The curators are interested scientific leaders, experienced developers.


In the Computer Scince direction, students usually do research .
In the framework of research, a student studies literature and solves problems on his chosen topic. The topic and the supervisor need to be determined independently, but the curator of the direction will help in the search. Research can be both purely theoretical and applied. This work can be the basis for admission to the master's program or graduate school.
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Upper and lower bounds on computational complexity , Vanya Mikhaylin

Over the past year and a half, Vanya has been engaged in proving the upper and lower bounds on the complexity of the algorithms. Although these two tasks are related, they are also very different. To prove the upper estimate, it suffices to give the algorithm and estimate its running time. To prove the lower bound, we need to somehow manage to show that not a single fast algorithm solves the computational problem under consideration. To prove the lower bounds, the model of Boolean circuits is usually considered. On the one hand, such a model is easier to analyze. On the other hand, any algorithm can be converted into a sequence of schemes.

Combinatorics and graph theory in bioinformatics , Serozha Aganezov

The field of bioinformatics is rapidly gaining momentum, biologists have more and more information that needs to be able to process, systematize and analyze. Bioinformatics deals with aspects of the analysis of biological information by mathematical methods. Serezha with his supervisor was engaged in one of the issues related to the reconstruction of the ancestral genomes of various species of living organisms that live on our planet today (the so-called median problem). Briefly, the task can be formulated as follows: if we have the genomes of three different individuals, we must find the genome that once existed before them, such that, from the point of view of evolution, it will be closer to this triple than any other.

In the areas of Data Mining and Software Engineering, students take the so-called practice : participate in individual or team projects. Work on the project involves the application of methods and knowledge obtained in the study courses of the center. Each team (from one person) and the project have a curator who prompts, helps to see and correct mistakes, shares experience. Students meet with their supervisors about once a week to discuss current progress and immediate tasks.

Value-tracking JavaScript analysis , Ilya Biryukov

The aim of the project was to develop a static analysis (ie, analyzing the program without its direct execution), which would allow to find out the interesting properties of the program. For example, to reveal that some conditions are always false, or the code contains errors.

Study of user happiness , Sonya Byzova

Every day we use search engines. Few people thought about the behavior of our mouse during the solution of such a problem. We seldom pay attention to how our mouse moves, when we are satisfied with the search results and when not so much. It was decided to conduct an experiment in which a group of users were asked to solve a number of search tasks on various topics and rate satisfaction with the search. After the experiment, a sufficient amount of raw data was collected in which knowledge could be obtained. This is exactly what was needed in the project in practice: it produced knowledge. The tools were machine learning and elements of statistical analysis.

File System Deduplicator , Kirill Kononov and Masha Korzhemanova

It's no secret that data on users' computers is often stored rather redundantly. This was the prerequisite for the beginning of the development of this project. Its essence is to create an application with a graphical interface that will allow the user to easily “de-duplicate” files on a computer. At the same time, an important requirement for the application was its independence from the specific platform.

GoodsReview , student team

The project GoodsReview is an online service that will help people confidently and quickly choose a product from an online store. The main idea is to collect and analyze feedback on the product, followed by automatic selection of the main and most important facts about it, which have both a negative and a positive assessment. This will allow the user to quickly find out what facts should be aware of this product.

Students of different directions are often united to work on projects. In some of them, the boundaries between “practice” and “R & D” are erased, and students' tasks are determined by their interests and desires. The next project involves students from all areas of study at the center.

Car brand recognition , student team

The guys are working on a project whose task is to recognize the make and model of the car from a photograph. There is a large dataset with photos of cars. It seems that no one before them had worked closely on a similar task - so why not? What is it for? For example, you can refine and supplement the ads for the sale of cars, recognizing the make and model of car. Or make a mobile application that tells you what kind of car is parked on the street.

Briefly about the center

The Computer Science Center is a joint initiative of the Academy of Modern Programming, Computer Science Club at POMI RAS and the School of Data Analysis. Website: http://compscicenter.ru/ . The center offers two- or three-year full-time evening courses in three areas: Computer Science (modern computer science), Data Mining (data analysis), Software Engineering (software development). Admission of students is held once a year in April-June.