SESL research assistants Darya Kharkina and Denis Bulygin took part in the conference of young scientists, which took place at the Summer School in Information Retrieval (RuSSIR 2015)
This was the 9th year of the RuSSIR, but this time it also included a new topic of graph retrieval, and it was held at a new venue: the new campus of HSE in Kantemirovskaya Str.
The lectures at the school were given by world-class scientists. For example, Professor Santo Fortunato, who was earlier participating in the International Conference on Computational Social Science, was talking about the search algorithms of communities in social networks.
Representatives of the largest Russian IT companies also gave several lectures. According to Denis Bulygin, the main feature of the school was its interdisciplinary character, which brought together specialists from vastly different areas, from sociologists to programmers.
The school also included a Young Scientists Conference in the poster format, which attracted young scientists from various European universities. Among other interesting presentations, Denis especially mentioned the research of Gleb Polevoy (PhD from the Delft University of Technology), who talked about his research of involvement and the participation of actors in creating a collective project by using methods of the game theory.
Our laboratory was presented by two posters: “Coding Social Interactions in Online Games” by Denis Bulygin (prepared under the guidance of Paul Okopny within the framework of the project on games research), and “Omnivore - Univore Music Preferences: Artists' Point of View” by Dasha Kharkina, which presented the study of homogeneity in the preferences of university students and students of vocational schools, which is one of the areas of research in SESL.
The participants have noted that this summer school is useful not just for researchers but also for industry specialists. Lectures by the representatives of the largest Russian IT companies, informal parties after the classes, and the poster session all contributed to this atmosphere. It should be noted that the lecturers talk not only about the methods of data analysis but also about their usage in research, and the ways of reaching meaningful conclusions using these methods. Overall, this summer school gives a valuable experience. The characteristics of this involve networking with other young scientists and making presentations in front of other researchers who work in various fields. It also involves looking at research problems from different angles, namely from the perspective of those whose questions and comments help one to create a more comprehensive picture about the strong and weak sides of one’s research.
By Maria Sergeeva