A team of students from Tomsk won the second place at the All-Russian Smart Campus hackathon, which was held at the NEIMARK IT campus in Nizhny Novgorod. More than 80 students from 20 regions of Russia competed in developing digital solutions for the education sector. The Tomsk team presented a project to improve Yandex communication service for people with speech and hearing impairments.
The Smart Campus hackathon was organized for the third time as part of the international conference Digital Industry of Industrial Russia. The conference gathered students majoring in IT, economics, and management. The teams developed innovative solutions for higher education in five tracks prepared jointly with Sberbank, Yandex, Gosuslugi, Alfa-Bank, and other technological and academic partners of the IT campus.
— Over the past three years, the Smart Campus hackathon has become a vibrant tradition that brings together talented students and progressive ideas, noted Andrei Omelchuk, Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education of Russia. – The active participation of students contributes to the creation of an effective educational ecosystem that ensures the successful functioning of the campus. The developments presented at the hackathon are already being implemented at NEIMARK and other campuses.
The team of Tomsk Region participated in Yandex track on developing a communication service for people with speech and hearing impairments. Bogdan Tarchenko and Stanislav Deinekin, students at the Higher IT School of Tomsk State University, Arina Tarasova, a master student at the Institute of Economics and Management at Tomsk State University, and Vladislav Mavrin, a student majoring in Software Engineering at Tomsk Polytechnic University dealt with the above case.
— The task was to improve the Yandex Conversation app, which works as a translator for people with speech and hearing impairments, says Yan Vismann, head of the digital solutions development department at TSU and assistant at the TSU Higher IT School. The developers wanted the service to be used not only for dialogue, but also for real-time speech transcription at events such as conferences or lectures.
Over two days, the team developed an MVP (minimum viable product) based on the Yandex app, integrating all the necessary functions as well as several additional improvements. As noted by TSU HITs student Bogdan Tarchenko, working on this project was particularly interesting for the students, as most of them are mobile developers working on iOS, .NET, and Android development.
— We added a “listening mode” to the app, which allows converting long messages into text, recognizing and identifying speakers using a neural network, and creating a brief summary of what you have listened to, added Bogdan Tarchenko. – We also included a feature that provides additional information on the topic of the message and generally improved the design and UX (user eXperience) of the service. For example, it is now possible to add frequently used phrases, which will allow people with hearing and speech impairments to spend less time typing thus making communication a bit more convenient.
The project by Tomsk students won the second place in the Yandex track. The company representatives presented the students with Yandex Station smart speakers and will also provide recommendations to group members who wish to pursue a career at their company.
For reference: The All-Russian Smart Campus hackathon was held with the support of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation and the National Research University Higher School of Economics — Nizhny Novgorod. The hackathon was organized by the NEIMARK IT campus. The competition was held as part of the federal project “Creation of a Network of Modern Campuses.”
