Educational projects in ABBYY: what's new?

The beginning of the new school year is a good reason. So your editor thought and went to the department, which in ABBYY is engaged in educational projects - to find out what interesting happened lately and what is planned for the future.

First of all, they told me that in July the next ABBYY Cup was held - the Olympiad in sports programming, which we are doing for the third time. This year we won almost the whole world - only African programmers should play more massively next year :)

The organizers note a higher level of competitors compared to last year - the stars of sports programming of world magnitude participated in the ABBYY Cup-2013.

As always, participants were asked to solve six problems of varying complexity. In order for the Olympiad to be truly “popular”, this year it was proposed to compose tasks for everyone on the codeforces.ru portal (the competition was held in spring), and the competent jury selected the most original and interesting ones. I must say, the authors of the tasks creatively approached the process and the wording of the tasks came out amusing. Especially, of course, got the beaver - the symbol of our dictionary Lingvo, and at the same time the ABBYY Cup.
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About how ABBYY Cup usually goes, we wrote in detail in a blog last year. You can watch and solve the tasks of this year’s finals here , and read the report from the finals here .

Another important educational project for ABBYY is the basic departments, let me remind you, we have three: the oldest is the department of image recognition and text processing at MIPT and two completely new departments of computational linguistics are at the same MIPT and at RSUH wrote ).

Linguists learned the whole year, but the department of recognition this summer has released both bachelors and masters. Of the 10 “fresh” graduates, 9 work in different divisions of ABBYY. By the way, no one obliges students and graduates to work in a company - we offer this opportunity to successful guys, but everyone decides for himself.

Students can participate not only in applied projects, but also in serious scientific matters - for example, some of them help to create the General Internet Corpus of the Russian Language ( GIKRYa ). This ambitious project began last fall, its first results were announced at the Dialogue international conference on computational linguistics, and you can familiarize yourself with them .

If you are not a student of our departments, but you really want to attend any of the courses , write to brains@abbyy.com with a description of who you are and where you study / work and what course you are interested in.

Those guys who for one reason or another could not or did not want to study in our departments can participate in other educational initiatives. So, we have already written several times about the ABBYY Labs project, which we do for all interested students. Now in the "laboratories" another group of fourth-year students under the guidance of our employee starts embedding the question-answer system in the knowledge base of our technical support.

In addition to the above, our employees go to summer school camps to give children lectures on linguistics and programming, and also speak at Mail.ru Technopark. By the way, very soon - in October - Konstantin Anisimovich, ABBYY Director of Research and Development, will speak at Technopark, he will talk about artificial intelligence in applications.

We still have a lot of ideas - we'll tell you about everything. Follow the news.