Society news at HSE University

As reported in Forbes, DeckRobot attracted $1.5 million in seed round investments this fall. Solo founder of the project and HSE graduate Anton Urbanas, aka Tony Urban, promises to simplify life for office workers by automating PowerPoint: now AI will create the slides. In this interview with Success Builder, Mr Urbanas explained why mathematicians are in demand in the U.S. right now, what could save office staff from sleepless nights with PowerPoint, how a startup can survive ‘imposter syndrome,’ whether it is easy to be a solo founder and how to start converting ideas into money.

Dan Livshitz, who graduated from the ICEF programme with a Bachelor’s degree in 2014, began his career at 18. At 22, he was the youngest associate ever to work for McKinsey in Europe. Now a top manager with the Gett global technology platform, Mr. Livshitz explained how to make the transition from consulting to technology, the inner workings of Gett and what not to say in a job interview.

After graduating with a master’s degree from the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences in 2002, Danila Vaskevich dreamed of the easy life, but the economic crisis in 2008 forced him to rethink his values. He left his management positions in consulting and retail to open the private Darovaniye (Gifted) school with the goal of, at least, helping children overcome ‘digital autism.’ He told Success Builder what HSE was like two decades ago, how to stop worshipping money, monetize your dreams, and create a ‘children’s MBA.’

The results of the 2020 Competition of Innovations in Education were announced at the V International Conference ‘More than Learning: Exploring the Next Normal’, organized by Sberbank Corporate University. This year’s winner was not only selected by the jury practically without discussion, but also received the Audience Award. The results were a rare example of such a unaminous choice in all seven years of the competition.

On November 6, Artigit’l, an online art residence, begins. This is a free international programme for artists, arts lovers, software developers and people working in the digital sphere. The HSE University Department of Innovation Management is one of the residency organizers.

With the transition online, basic education is experiencing a crisis even while specialised education is becoming more interesting and personalised. The Rebotica project has been successfully riding the digital wave with career guidance programmes for children that help students make independent choices about their future. Rebotica founder and HSE graduate Alexander Kiselev told Success Builder how the HSE incubator cultivates entrepreneurs, where to gather data on the education market, why Minecraft is useful in classes with schoolchildren and what you need to know to launch a startup.

Dmitry Storcheus set out to become an economist, but then shifted gears abruptly and went into mathematics. With a Master’s degree from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, he now works as a software engineer for Google and continues to conduct research with his academic supervisor and work on his PhD thesis. Here, he tells Success Builder why ICEF Mathematics graduates are head and shoulders above their U.S. competitors, why Facebook and Google are opening departments at universities, what ‘self-learning neural networks’ are and whether they threaten to unleash a real-life ‘Terminator’ against humanity.

The gallery is celebrating its return from working from home to regular offline life with the recently opened exhibition ‘NOW’. This exhibition displays graduation projects by nine graduates of the programme in Design and Contemporary Art.