Deprived of the premium for Russian citizenship, the programmer will receive a payment from Mail.ru

The programmer Vladimir Iglovikov, currently living and working in the United States, took second place in the British Data Science Challenge competition . Iglovikov should have been paid a cash reward of 12,000 pounds sterling. Two days after the end of the competition, the organizers contacted the programmer and explained that they could not pay the prize money because of non-compliance with the competition criteria: Iglovikov has Russian citizenship. Yesterday it became known that the company Mail.ru will pay remuneration instead of the organizers of the competition.

Vladimir Iglovikov (profile at “Habrahabr” and at “Hiktaims” - ternaus ) graduated from the Physics Department of St. Petersburg State University with a master's degree, then received a Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis. Iglovikov left his research activities and went to the company Bidgely, then moved to TrueAccord as a senior researcher. At the moment, Vladimir lives in the United States.

Iglovikov takes part in various data science contests, he is active on the Kaggle site. On May 20, Facebook Iglovikov announced that he took second place in the Data Science Challenge competition. However, the tone of his notes was disappointed: the organizers of the competition contacted him and stated that it was impossible to pay a monetary reward. They motivated this by a clause in the rules that prohibits prize payments to citizens of certain countries.


According to the site, the Data Science Challenge is a competition that is organized and financed by the government agencies of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland: the intelligence services MI5 and MI6 , the Laboratory for Defense Technologies and Sciences ( DSTL ) and the British Ministry of Science. The quoted paragraph 2.3b of the rules reads as follows:
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2.3 No payment shall be made (whether it is directly or through a third party / country) to:

[...]

(b) or less, according to Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2014, or ...

2.3. Payments will not be made (either directly or through a third party / country):

[...]

(b) a person who has citizenship, lives or is in any country with a corruption perception index value according to Transparency International for 2014 is 37 points or lower, or

Other sections of subparagraph 2.3 say that payments can also be denied to any member if the United Kingdom government or its authorized representative is not satisfied with the identity of the recipient. The rules do not specify which criteria may apply in this case.

Since 1996, the non-governmental organization Transparency International updates the corruption perception index annually. The index is expressed as an integer from 0 to 100. The higher the value, the lower the level of corruption according to the perception of analysts and entrepreneurs. Data for 2015 and 2016 is now available. Why the data for 2014 was chosen, the contest rules are not explained. The choice of the cut-off value of 37 points and the specific year of the report leave room for the search for political intent of the rule. For example, the value for China in 2014 is 36 points, India - 38, and in the report for 2016 both countries have a figure of 40. However, many such patterns can be found, all of which will remain unconfirmed assumptions.

The corruption perception index of Russia in 2015 improved from 27 points to 29, in 2016 the value did not change. All this is less than the required 38 points. Also in the 2014 report, several countries of the former USSR are located below the cut-off: Kazakhstan (29), Ukraine (26), Belarus (31) and others.

Science should be above politics, without discrimination by age, gender, nationality or country of origin, said Iglovikov in a post on Facebook. As Vladimir explained in the comments, the loss of remuneration is not so important for him - it is less than his monthly salary in the company in San Francisco. In a conversation with RT, Iglovikov said that he knew about the problem point of the rules and discussed it with the organizers before the announcement of the results. The participant was promised that this item is temporary and will be changed, which did not happen.

Mail.Ru Group announced that it will pay Vladimir Iglovikov £ 12 thousand instead of the organizers of the Data Science Challenge. Mail.Ru stated that there should be no nationalities and borders in the IT sphere: “The industry develops faster and more efficiently when specialists have the opportunity to share knowledge and experience.” A company representative has already contacted the winner.

Updated 2017-05-24 07:20 Moscow time: Vladimir asked to transfer money to the Russian Science Foundation .