HSE & VK Engineering and Mathematics School Showcases 13 Projects at 10th Demo Day
The 10th Demo Day of the Joint HSE & VK Engineering and Mathematics School was held at the VK Moscow office. Students of the three workshops presented the results of 13 projects in the fields of artificial intelligence, information security, and digital platforms. Students worked on the development of recommendation services, systems for psycholinguistic text analysis and speech processing, methods for identifying celebrities in videos, algorithms for determining the toxicity of memes, security mechanisms for AI systems, and approaches to improving the effectiveness of neural network models.
Dmitry Kovalenko, Director of the HSE Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics, and Kirill Bogatyrev, Head of Project-Based Learning at VK, delivered welcoming speeches at the event. They shared their impressions about the school's development and the demand for its graduates.
‘The cooperation between MIEM and VK Education gives students of the Engineering and Mathematics School workshops the opportunity to work on projects using VK cases, which allows them to bring practical training to a qualitatively new level. As part of the project, students work as VK interns, and many of them continue their careers at the company,’ said Dmitry Kovalenko.
‘The Joint HSE & VK Engineering and Mathematics School trains strong specialists for the IT industry. We not only provide students with core competencies, but also develop systems thinking skills, an understanding of technology, and the ability to work with real products. More than 60 students participate in the workshops, more than 30 graduates have already joined the VK team—this is a clear proof of the relevance and quality of training,’ said Kirill Bogatyrev.
Students of the workshop on applied artificial intelligence presented the results of four projects, including: a system of psycholinguistic text analysis; VLMemes—a collection of datasets and an evaluation of visual-language models to detect toxicity, sarcasm, and cultural references; detection and identification of celebrities in video; and rapid generation of MCMC samples using neural networks.
Three projects were presented by students of the workshop for the safe development and operation of high-load systems: research on attack methods and protection of predictive AI models; a security monitoring tool for ML models and datasets; and the use of code constructs for k-anonymisation.
Students of the AI services and platforms workshop presented six projects: a model for noise reduction and speech reverberation; improving the efficiency of neural network architectures for sequence processing, including language models; super-resolution of audio to high frequency in low-resource devices; improving the quality of the speech signal for voice interfaces in noisy environments; attacks on large visual-language models; and ContextRank, dynamic social recommendations based on the integration of LLM and RL with the modelling of asymmetric trust.
New projects have taken their place on the ‘Project Tree of the Joint HSE & VK Engineering and Mathematics School.’ Since the launch of the initiative in 2022, a total of 52 projects have already been presented.
‘The level of students' training and the quality of projects continue to increase with each demo day. Workshop participants not only publish academic articles, but also speak at high-level conferences. It's nice to see how the school develops and gains new projects and ideas,’ said Fedor Ivanov, Director of the Joint HSE & VK Engineering and Mathematics School.
The event culminated in the awarding of certificates and memorable gifts to 24 graduates of the school workshops.
See also:
‘To Keep Pace with Technology, Foresight Itself Must Become Faster’
The Innovation and Technology Management Conference (InnoTech 2026), organised by Elsevier publishing house in partnership with Tsinghua University, has taken place in Beijing. The event focused on the challenges of managing technological development in the age of artificial intelligence. Olesia Maibakh and Danil Yatskin, researchers from the International Research and Educational Foresight Centre at the HSEInstitute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge (ISSEK), presented the findings of the large-scale foresight study ‘IT in Russia: Development Scenarios’ conducted with the support of Yandex.
Tabular Data Anonymisation Solution for Safe Use in AI Systems Developed at HSE University
The AI and Digital Science Institute at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science has developed a tabular data anonymisation service designed to prepare corporate datasets for use in analytics and AI applications. The solution can identify personal data in structured datasets, apply consistent and reproducible anonymisation rules, and generate the artifacts required for quality control, auditing, and subsequent use of data in secure environments.
HSE Scientists Develop Method to Compress Large Language Models Without Losing Quality
Researchers from the AI and Digital Science Institute at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science have developed a new compression method for large language models such as GPT and LLaMA that reduces their size by 25–36% without additional training or significant loss of accuracy. This is the first approach to use mathematical transformations—specifically, rotations of model weights—to make models more amenable to compression with structured matrices. The study results have been published in ACL Findings 2025. The code is available on GitHub.
HSE Scientists Train Neural Network to 'Hear' Faults in Electric Motors
Researchers at the AI and Digital Science Institute of the HSE Faculty of Computer Science have developed a new method—the Signature-Guided Data Augmentation (SGDA) framework—that achieves 99% accuracy in motor fault detection and 86% accuracy in fault classification. The application of this approach can reduce industrial equipment repair costs, minimise downtime, and improve production safety. The study results have been published in Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.
HSE Graduate’s AI Project Wins at TECH & AI Awards
Daria Davydova, graduate of the HSE Graduate School of Business and Head of the AI Implementation Unit at the Artificial Intelligence Department of Alfa-Bank, received a prize at the TECH & AI Awards. She was awarded for the best AI solution for optimising business processes. The winners were determined as part of the VII Russian Summit and Awards on Digital Transformation (CDO/CDTO Summit & Awards).
HSE University to Present Digital Projects at CIPR 2026
CIPR 2026, Russia’s largest conference on the digital transformation of key industrial sectors, has opened in Nizhny Novgorod. The event brings together Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, members of the government, governors, company executives, and researchers. This year, HSE University has become an official partner of the conference. Vice Rector Elena Odoevskaia and other university representatives will take part in expert sessions and sign a number of agreements, while the university’s exhibition stand will showcase a range of digital developments.
New Neural Network for Science and Innovation Being Developed at HSE University
HSE researchers are training large language models (LLMs) to understand Russian-language scientific terminology while improving their energy efficiency. The adapted model runs 2.7 times faster and requires 73% less memory than the original open model, allowing it to operate on more affordable hardware. The programme has passed state registration.
HSE FCS Researchers Showcase AI and Bioinformatics Breakthroughs at ICLR 2026
Researchers from the AI and Digital Science Institute at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science, along with students from the AI360: Artificial Intelligence Engineering track of the Applied Mathematics and Information Science bachelor’s programme, took part in ICLR, one of the world’s most prestigious international conferences on machine learning and representation learning. This year’s event was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
HSE Students Among Winners of Yandex High-Tech Startup Accelerator
Yandex has announced the results of its Yandex AI Startup Lab accelerator, whose final round featured 12 IT projects. Over the course of three months, their creators—students and young entrepreneurs—worked alongside the company’s experts to develop their products. Four startups in digital marketing, medicine, and robotics were named the best, with their teams receiving cash prizes and cloud resource grants. Among them was Gradius, a startup founded by students from HSE University.
The Future of Cardiogenetics Lies in Artificial Intelligence
Researchers from the AI and Digital Science Institute at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science have developed a program capable of analysing regions of the human genome that were previously inaccessible for accurate interpretation in genetic testing. The program adapts large generative AI (GenAI) models for cardiogenetics to predict how specific mutations affect the function of individual genes.