HSE Teachers Awarded Yandex ML Prize
The awards ceremony for the international Yandex ML Prize was held in Moscow. This year, all three winners in the ‘ML Educators’ category were HSE faculty members—Evgeny Sokolov, Associate Professor and Head of the Big Data and Information Retrieval School, Anton Konushin, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science, and Aleksei Shpilman, Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics at HSE’s St. Petersburg School of Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science.
This year marks the sixth time that Yandex has awarded the Yandex ML Prize in the field of machine learning. The award committee selected 14 winners whose work on generative models, natural language processing, computer vision, information retrieval, speech recognition and synthesis, and cognitive robotics has shown significant potential and impact. A total of 160 applications were submitted across five categories.
The Prize Panel recognized Evgeny Sokolov for his work in machine and deep learning, as well as statistical learning theory. Anton Konushin was praised for his contributions to computer vision, while Aleksei Shpilman was recognized for his expertise in applied machine learning, reinforcement learning, and agent-based systems.
Evgeny Sokolov
‘Teaching for me is like a breath of fresh air. It’s an opportunity to do something truly creative,’ said Evgeny Sokolov. ‘At our Faculty of Computer Science, we have highly capable students who have a strong desire to deeply engage with the subject and have high expectations from their instructors. This keeps me on my toes and encourages me to be critical of what and how I teach. Positive feedback from my students and their gratitude after completing a course are the best rewards and a source of great happiness for me. Thanks to Yandex I first joined the faculty as a lecturer in machine learning, and then as a full-fledged staff member. This award confirms that I am, indeed, in the right place.’
In 2023, two other researchers from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science also received the Yandex ML Prize: Aibek Alanov, Junior Research Fellow at the Centre of Deep Learning and Bayesian Methods and researcher at AIRI, and Pavel Braslavski, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Models and Methods of Computational Pragmatics.
The annual Yandex scientific and educational prize was established in 2019 in memory of Ilya Segalovich to support the scientific community. The prize supports researchers and educators in the fields of AI and machine learning, encouraging them to continue their scientific work. Candidates from 11 countries are eligible to compete for the award. Over the past six years, more than 60 researchers have become winners.
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