The third annual Ilya Segalovich Award ceremony presented each of the six winners with one million rubles to recognize their outstanding contributions to applied and theoretical research in computer science and related fields.
Yandex established the honor, named after its co-founder Ilya Segalovich, in 2019. Open to young researchers and academics in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, the Award recognizes new talent and outstanding work in research supervision in the key areas of Yandex interest and has already supported more than two dozen recipients. This year’s event took place in Moscow at the end of last month and honored four young researchers and two academics. They were recognized alongside the 2020 winners, who were unable to receive their awards in person due to Covid restrictions last year. Two of this year’s winners are repeat honorees.
The topics of research honored by the Ilya Segalovich award this year include recurrent neural networks and recurrent learning, online machine learning, generative models and aggregating algorithms, optimization methods, agent-based systems and reinforcement learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence.
In addition to the monetary prize, the Award covers travelling expenses and fees to attend any conference of the winner’s choice. Each winner is also provided with a credit for Yandex’s cloud service Yandex DataSphere and its data labeling platform Toloka.
The Ilya Segalovich Award was created to not only reward young scientists for their achievements, but also to provide them with the opportunity to continue their academic research.
Yandex supports education and research in a number of ways, including through its Yandex School of Data Analysis, collaborations with universities, and its Educational Initiative. Launched in 2019, the Educational Initiative trains IT specialists, enables people to participate in the digital economy, equips school teachers with technology skills and helps them engage with their students. The ultimate goal of the Initiative is to support science, foster a knowledge society, and improve education through technology.