Translation. Region: Russian Federal
Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –
© Higher School of Economics
A project session dedicated to scientific and technological cooperation between the university and VTB Bank was held at the Higher School of Economics. HSE employees presented a wide range of projects that will help ensure the bank’s technological leadership. For example, this includes creating 3D avatars based on a person’s photo or solutions to reduce employee stress levels. In total, 21 projects were taken on by the bank. The next meeting of VTB and HSE representatives will take place in September.
The session was attended by experts from the “Testing New Technologies” stream, as well as experts from the data analysis and modeling departments and the digital development operating model of VTB and representatives of the bank’s technology partner, IT holding T1.
The strategic session began with a welcome from the host.
“HSE is a large university. We have five campuses, including an online campus. HSE has more than 55 thousand students, almost 4.5 thousand teachers and researchers, and the university carries out more than 600 research projects annually. These projects give us more than 3,000 publications, and it is very pleasing that HSE published 40% of Russian A* reports on artificial intelligence last year,” said Igor Sokolov, Director of Research and Development at HSE, a little about what the university is today. According to him, the university conducts more than 150 unique fundamental studies annually and more than 270 applied projects are done for organizations, ministries and departments.
Most of the projects at HSE are implemented by research departments (the largest is Institute for Statistical Research and Economics of Knowledge), the contribution of faculties is growing annually, and one of the goals of the strategic session is their active involvement in interaction with partners, noted Igor Sokolov.
At the beginning of the program “Priority 2030“HSE’s revenue from research and development from all sources amounted to 5 billion rubles. By 2030, the university has set an ambitious goal of doubling this amount “on a parity basis: half from the state assignment, half from applied research,” he also said. “At the moment, we expect that applied research at HSE will slightly outpace the state assignment, including with the participation of partners such as VTB Bank,” Igor Sokolov added.
Director Center for commercialization of developments and technology transfer HSE University Anton Yanovsky, in turn, noted that HSE is a university that knows how to make intellectual products and sell them under a license model. According to him, HSE already has a fairly large package of products from various fields – from expert analytics, medical applications, genetic tests to linguistic applications and sensory testing systems.
The list of such products is constantly growing. “Our task is not just to transfer the results of scientific research to the customer, but also to create products together with them that can be sold in series,” Anton Yanovsky noted. If we consider the dynamics of the development of relations with business partners, the university has a growing number of licensing deals, he added.
“VTB is actively developing interaction with technological innovations from the open market, including through work with scientific schools. Today, the bank has built its own system for working with innovations, several teams that have colossal expertise in research, testing and piloting innovative technological solutions. The bank has a fairly high appetite for using breakthrough technologies to solve business problems,” said Deputy Head of the IT Architecture Department, Vice President of VTB Andrey Kovalenko.
The heads of the VTB Accelerator teams, the VTB Innovation Studio and the VTB Technology Laboratory shared their expertise on how to build effective cooperation with the bank, and also reviewed HSE projects for the potential development of partnership.
Among the solutions presented by HSE employees were projects to create a visual search system within videos, an educational chatbot, a model for generating 3D avatars based on a person’s photograph, as well as projects for solutions to reduce employee stress. A total of 32 projects were reviewed, 5 of which were from the HSE campuses in Perm and St. Petersburg. Following the review, 21 projects were included in the framework of the mutual cooperation agreement. Representatives of VTB and HSE agreed that the next strategic session will be held in the fall.
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