Dean's Address
From the very beginning, we were pursuing a challenging goal to create not merely a faculty but a full-fledged research centre. Our goal was to ensure a wide range of activities from developing state-of-the-art educational programmes to implementing world-class research projects relevant to business and education. Around the world this approach has become an institutional standard (consider universities like MIT and Caltech) but in Russia it is still not mainstream.
The main issue was to combine education with R&D while maintaining the integrity of both. Thankfully, our main partner, Yandex is a market leader.
We started with three schools, three departments and two laboratories, as well as two bachelor’s and two master’s programmes. Now the faculty is home to twelve laboratories, as well as to five departments established in cooperation with research institutions and industrial partners. Furthermore, we have developed a double degree programme in applied mathematics and information science with London School of Economics. The Faculty of Computer Science offers seven master’s programmes including our new Data Science online master’s programme. In addition, we are actively developing vocational education programmes in computer science.
Recently, we set to work on a unique Data Culture project. This project aims at making sure that all HSE University undergraduate students learn the core principles of data analysis, including skills for using basic technologies and methods for data processing in their respective fields.
Our partners today include major companies like Sberbank, Samsung, SAS, and JetBrains. Our professors and researchers present papers at major international conferences like NIPS and ICML. Furthermore, overall citation rate increases every year, as does the total number of publications indexed in Scopus and WoS. Our position on the QS World University Rankings has been consistently on the rise in Computer Science and in Mathematics.
Russia’s best and brightest study with us. For instance, this year we have over 2,000 students. The faculty is popular among foreign applicants as well. Since 2016 the number of international students increased by 60%. This is all the more noticeable, since the faculty was only founded in 2014.
Now we are faced with an even harder task – not lingering or stalling but growing still, while maintaining the quality of our work. And we are ready to meet this challenge!