Pavel Braslavski became the winner of the Yandex ML Prize

Congratulations to Pavel Braslavski, a senior researcher at the laboratory, who became a laureate of the Yandex ML Prize (formerly the Ilya Segalovich Prize) in the scientific supervisors category.

We also congratulate our dear colleagues in the Department of Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence and laboratory partners - Ilya Makarov (MISIS, AIRI) and Sergei Nikolenko (POMI RAS, St. Petersburg State University), who became laureates of the Yandex ML Prize in the categories of scientific supervisors and teaching machine learning, respectively.

 

Pavel Isaakovich Braslavski – Candidate of Technical Sciences, senior researcher at the Laboratory for Models and Methods of Computational Pragmatics and Associate Professor of the Department of Big Data and Information Retrieval, has extensive research experience in the field of information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), as well as application of the developed methods in practice in the companies Yandex, SKB Kontur, JetBrains and others.

 

Pavel is a graduate of the Faculty of Physics and Technology of USTU-UPI (now UrFU) in Yekaterinburg.

Over the years, the laureate has taught courses for undergraduate and graduate students at the Ural Federal University, the HSE campuses in Moscow and St. Petersburg, ITMO University, the Academic University in St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg University and Yandex ShAD. In 2017, Pavel Braslavsky published an open online course on OEL on the Stepik platform.

Pavel regularly publishes in the proceedings of leading international conferences, and is a member of the program committees of foreign and domestic conferences (EMNLP, ECIR, SIGIR, AIST, DAMDID/RCDL, DIALOGUE, etc.).

Pavel is also the initiator and organizer of a series of summer schools RuSSIR (2007-2018) held several times at the Higher School of Economics (http://romip.ru/russir2015/, http://romip.ru/russir2014/), a participant in various initiatives to evaluate methods IP and OEL (for example, Russian seminar on methods for assessing information retrieval). Pavel completed scientific internships abroad at Emory University (Atlanta, USA), Bauhaus Universität (Weimar, Germany) and Humboldt Universität (Berlin, Germany).

It is worth noting that historically one of the undertakings of Pavel Braslavsky and Ilya Segalovich (co-founder of Yandex) is a series of competitions “Internet Mathematics” (https://yandex.ru/blog/company/25531, https://yandex.ru/blog/ company/10115) on Internet data analysis and information retrieval - contributed to attracting and shaping the interests of young researchers in this field, including current laboratory researchers and their managers.

In 2013, thanks to the efforts of Pavel and other colleagues from Yandex and the National Research University Higher School of Economics, one of the main international conferences on information retrieval, ECIR, was held for the first time in Moscow.

 

Collaborative work carried out with undergraduate and graduate students under the leadership of P. Braslavsky over the past 2-3 years confirms his high status as an international scientist in the field of information retrieval and natural language processing (works published in A* and A level conferences, such as ACL, SIGIR, WSDM, ECIR, EMNLP, CIKM, etc.). It is noteworthy that digital libraries have preserved early joint works by Pavel in collaboration with Ilya Segalovich and other colleagues who were at the origins of Yandex, presented at a WWW conference that was historically important for the development of the field: for example, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145 /1135777.1135950.

 

It is worth mentioning the versatility of the laureate’s scientific interests; thus, back in the late 90s – early 2000s, Pavel prepared and defended his thesis for a candidate in cultural studies, which in its own way anticipated and described our perception of achievements in the field of artificial intelligence technologies in recent years: “Virtual reality technology as a cultural phenomenon of the late 20th – early 21st centuries.” Diss. Ph.D. cultural studies. Ekaterinburg, Ural State University, 2003. (abstract + full text).

 

Colleagues appreciate and love Pavel for his subtle sense of humor, willingness to share his experience and support scientific endeavors and new projects.

 

See also faculty news https://www.hse.ru/news/science/880987303.html.