III Российско-индийская проектная программа

We invite students of grades 9–11 to participate in the selection for the program. These students shall be:
 

• Alumni of educational programs of the Sirius Center in the field of Informatics or Computer Science
   
• Or alumni of the Scientific and Technological program "Big Challenges" (Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Research, or Smart City program)
   
• Or students of specialized classes of the Sirius Lyceum

Total number of students for this program is 24.

Students will work in teams on one of the following projects: 

1. Assessing the Quality of Machine Translation for the Languages of Russia and India

2. Distant Education: statistical analysis of the difficulty of Olympiad tasks

3. Applied cognitive science: development of web-platform for parallel neuroimaging data processing

4. Health and wellbeing monitoring data analysis and abnormalities search

5. Promoting Sports, Fitness, and Games Training

6. Chemistry: On the Fly Check and Search identities in chemical databases

7. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence: customizable news feed aligned to user interests

8. Digital Financial Assets of the 21st Century

Students can apply to the program from October 20 to October 26, attaching an essay in English of max. 1 page. The essay should cover the following issues:

• Your programming skills (including projects, Olympiads, online-courses, Sirius programs, etc.)

• Your interests, skills, and experience in the areas related to the projects (Biology, Data Analyzes, Linguistics, etc.)

• Desired project/projects and your role in the team (How can you help the team in developing the project?)

• Your motivation: why are you interested in the project? Why do you want to participate in this educational program?

If you have projects published on GitHub, you can add a link to your profile.
 

From October 28 to October 31, applicants will have personal interviews with mentors. 

The main selection criteria for the program are:

• High programming skills confirmed by results at the final stages of the All-Russian Olympiad of School Students in Computer Science or by the successful implementation of the project requiring programming skills during the "Big Challenges" program 

• Knowledge of English at a level sufficient for international communication

• High motivation and deep interest in the project

Towards inculcating a spirit of innovation and collaboration between young minds of Russia and India, Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), NITI Aayog, Government of India and Fund “Talent and Success” (Sirius) in Russia are collaborating to conduct exchange programs to nurture the bilateral relations in the field of education. 

AIM and Sirius are organizing a first-of-its-kind 14-day virtual educational learning, innovation program for 50 talented students from India and Russia. The program is focused on Developing Technological Solutions (Web-based and Mobile Applications) for the key Grassroot Problems linked with the big challenges of both nations. The educational program and hackathon are designed to develop students’ competencies in understanding 21st-century technologies and developing innovative engineering and technological projects to meet the crusting challenges of sustainable development.

Expected Project Outcome: The teams are expected to understand modern trends and requirements, define problem statements, develop innovations, and showcase their prototypes/proof of concepts/applications at the conclusion of the program.

1. Technology and Mentorship:

The Innovations developed by the student teams shall leverage 21st-century technologies such as – App Development, Artificial Intelligence, BlockChain, Machine Learning, Data analytics and visualization, UI/UX, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Gamification, 3D Design, Rapid Prototyping, etc.

Mentors from Industry and Academia partners of AIM are selected to work closely with the teams to develop their ideas and innovations. Sirius also nominates the panel of Russian Mentors and educators. 

2. Team Composition:

Each Focus Area Team shall consist of 10 participants, as follows:

3. Focus Areas:

The Program consists of 8 Focus Areas with Team Composition as mentioned in Section ‘B’. The Lead Mentors shall be trusted for their respective Focus Area Teams and manage the content and agenda. The Lead Mentors will be directly connected with AIM and Sirius Team for any assistance/support during the course of the Program.

The focus areas selected are as follows:

1. Assessing the Quality of Machine Translation for the Languages of Russia and India
   The teams shall develop an online tool to enable sharing and learning of cultures of Russia and India. 

• Within this course, the students may identify and embrace each other’s cultures and develop a tool for assessing the quality of machine translation for the languages of Russia and India

• Key Learning: computational linguistics, cultural exchange, Web design.

• Obligatory competencies: Web/Mobile Application development.

• Desirable knowledge: Basics of Graphics Design.

Both Russia and India are linguistically very diverse, with some 150 languages being spoken in Russia and some 450 languages in India. Unfortunately, only a small number of these languages are supported by popular machine translation systems, such as Google Translate, Yandex.Translate, and Bing. Also, most languages of Russia and India lack resources that are required to evaluate the quality of machine translation. The aim of this project is twofold:

• to create a crowdsourcing platform to collect human translations from Russian, English, and Hindi into the languages of Russia and India and vice versa;

• to compile a crowdsourced dataset consisting of human evaluations of machine translation systems that will be useful to fine-tune existing quality metrics.

2. Distance education: Statistical analysis of the difficulty of Olympiad tasks

The teams will have to come up with a way of estimating which tasks from an Olympiad can be considered more difficult than others and why. They will be given a large dataset containing results of several nation-wide Olympiads in order to explore it for hidden dependencies and come up with a solution. The developed approach will later be used in Sirius's own platform for conducting Russian National Olympiads.

• During this course, the students will learn to work with large datasets: to prepare, process, and visualize the data, as well as make useful decisions based on it. The students will also employ several approaches of data analysis: clustering, feature extraction/selection, classification, etc.

• Key Learning: working with large datasets and analyzing the data.

• Requirements: basic knowledge of Python.

• Would also be useful to know: Python libraries for data analysis, such as numpy and scikit-learn.

• Applied cognitive science: development of web-platform for parallel neuroimaging data processing
  The teams shall develop a web-platform for automatic neuroimaging data processing using Python and cluster computing.

  Cognitive science studies brain mechanisms of human perception, thinking, problem solving, and other cognitive processes. New technologies allow us to get new insights into these processes, using Big data and advanced computational methods. The results of the project will facilitate new discoveries that may lead to an improvement in education and other human endeavors.  

1. Key learning objectives: The teams will develop understanding of cognitive science; neuroimaging methods, focusing on EEG; and develop their programming skills.

2. Obligatory competencies: knowledge of Unity, Python; Web/Mobile Application development.  

3. Desirable knowledge: interest in the human mind and behavior.

4. Health and wellbeing monitoring data analysis and abnormalities search 
   The team shall develop a digital tool focused on the health and wellbeing monitoring of children.

• This course is focused on developing a tool to help children and young adults with health and wellbeing data processing (such as physical activity, heart rate, electrocardiogram, etc.)

• Key learning: Leveraging wearable devices technology to enhance the health and wellbeing of humans of the 21st century.Obligatory competencies: Web/Cross-platform offline application development, health, and wellbeing monitoring data processing, smart wearable devices.

• Desirable knowledge: Good overall knowledge of wearable monitoring technologies; principles of monitoring data processing; health and wellbeing.

5. Promoting Sports, Fitness, and Games Training
   The team shall develop a digital tool focused on training of sports, physical fitness, and games.

• This course is focused on leveraging various sports experts from both countries and to create structured training masterclasses for beginners, delivered through an online tool.

• Key learning: Sports curriculum development, physical training, etc.

• Obligatory competencies: Web/Mobile Application development, Amateur Training in at least one sport/game, Good communication skills.

• Desirable knowledge: Video/content creation, Creativity and Digital skills, experience with one coding language.

6. Chemistry: On the Fly Check and Search identities in chemical databases
   The team shall develop a digital tool focused on Biological and Genetics Research. 

• This course is focused on facilitating fast search in chemical databases (ZINC, DrugBank, SAVI, ChEMBL, ChemSpider, emolecules, Mcule, etc.) for identical or similar chemical structures based on drawings in a 2D-sketcher.

• Key learning: Remote analysis of samples, APIs of chemical databases, representation/drawing of chemical structures on a computer, real-time traverse and search in databases, chemical data structures.

• Obligatory competencies: Web/Cross-platform offline Application development, Organic Chemistry, Database search, etc.

• Desirable knowledge: Strong research skills, experience in using chemical databases API, Chemical information structures or chemoinformatics, knowledge of hashes and other approaches to fast search in big databases.

7. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence: customizable news feed aligned to user interests 
   The team will create a news aggregation system that will provide a customizable news feed aligned to user interests. 

• The system will leverage existing machine learning techniques to create a comprehensive picture of the day that would not overwhelm users.

• Obligatory competencies: Knowledge of any of the modern programming languages is strongly required to participate in a project. Web/Mobile Application development, Artificial Intelligence, experience with large data sets, experience with one coding language.

• Would be useful knowledge of either:

  •     Any web framework, such as Spring, Django, etc. 

  •     Any ML-framework, such as PyTorch, Keras, etc.

  •     Any Frontend framework, such as React, VueJS, etc.

8. Digital Financial Assets of the 21st Century
   The teams shall develop a liquidity aggregator for digital financial assets (crypto-currencies) across multiple financial exchanges, and machine-learning-based predictors of exchange rates.

• This course is focused on learning software technologies used in financial exchanges for digital financial assets and developing a client that aggregates information from multiple exchanges in real-time and uses the aggregated data for making predictions about the dynamics of assets’ exchange rates.

• Key learning: Microstructure of financial markets, exchange protocols, liquidity aggregation, price prediction methods.

• Obligatory competences: HTTP / WebSocket client development, Creative thinking.

• Desirable knowledge: Some knowledge about digital financial assets and exchanges.

4. Final Presentation to the dignitaries

Students will present their work (including the amount of processed data and other collected info) as infographics and explain their solution to the given problem (might be presented as augmented reality project, short clip or other suggested form). Application of the technology relevant for both India and Russia.

The delivery shall be in Virtual mode to the key Dignitaries on the Presentation Day. Each Presentation shall last for 5 minutes.

5. Duration

The Program shall commence from 7th November 2020 and conclude on 21st November 2020 (Subject to approvals and availability of the dignitaries). The total duration of the Program is 50 hours.

The Teams may dedicate up to extra 2 hours per day if required. In such cases the Lead Mentors must inform AIM and Sirius. Working sessions will NOT be conducted during late hours.  ​