Yandex to Give One Million for Quality Education

Internet, April 14, 2006. Yandex announces Class-2006, an open contest of educational courses on information search. Postgraduate students and university teachers are welcome to take part in the contest. The prize fund is RUB 1 million.

The task for the participants is as follows: to provide detailed lecture plans on one or several subjects from the list, lecture slides, and the text for one of the lectures. The projects will be evaluated by a committee consisting of Yandex employees, representatives of universities and research institutes, and information search system development companies.

Information search is a vast field of knowledge. Therefore, the contest is open for specialists in various branches of science from math and computer science to applied linguistics. Both Russian and foreign citizens can take part in the competition; contest materials are to be submitted in Russian. According to the rules of the contest, teaching materials provided by the winners will be made public, giving a possibility for teachers in other schools to use them free of charge.

“Yandex has an immediate interest in the quality of education in the area of information search,” comments Pavel Braslavski, Web Search Department project manager and associate professor of the Computer Engineering Department at the Urals State Technical University. “We are convinced that the contest will draw attention of both teachers and students to this challenging and rapidly developing area of knowledge.”

Some of the subjects offered to the contest participants to come up with educational courses are: multi-language information search, multimedia search (image, video, music, and speech search), classification and clusterization of text documents, modeling of user information needs and behavior, interfaces and visualization in information search systems, search spam, and web safety.

The deadline for submitting materials for the contest is June 23, 2006. Winner awards and publication of the best educational courses are scheduled for September 2006.

Class-2006 is yet another scientific and educational initiative of Yandex. In 2004-2005, Yandex Scientific Grants program financed 34 research projects for a total amount of RUB 3 million. For more detailed information about the contest, please visit http://company.yandex.ru/class/.

Contact:
Media Relations
Vladimir Isaev, Ochir Mandzhikov
Phone: +7 495 739-7000
E-mail: pr@yandex-team.com