Studying in IT

ITMO University occupies several prominent buildings in the centre of St. Petersburg. But residents and guests alike rarely get a chance to take a look at what’s happening inside them. Articles featured in this digest will take you on a virtual tour of our labs, as well as shed some light on the work underway within our walls.

One of our previous articles featured an overview of our photonics department students’ work lives. Today we’re going to expand on this topic by looking at four related MA programs: “Light Guide Photonics and Programmable Electronics”, “LED technologies and optoelectronics”, “Photonic materials” and “Laser technologies”. We sat down with some of the folks currently enrolled in these programs, as well as recent graduates, to talk about the role ITMO University played in kickstarting their careers.

The flashcard method, also known as the Leitner system, has been around for over 40 years. This versatile learning approach helps students save time and process information. Let’s look at what makes it work.

Memory has been studied for dozens of years, yet common myths surrounding it are refusing to die out.

Let’s talk about photographic memory, and how made-up memories influence our lives.

We talked to the graduates of the Speech Information Systems MA program at ITMO about the ways our university helped jumpstart their careers. [More stories from our startups]:

• ITMO University startup accelerator introduces Laeneco, a smart stethoscope
• Quantum communications: building 100% secure data transfer systems

Laeneco is a smart stethoscope capable of detecting respiratory diseases with greater accuracy than most trained medical professionals. Let's take a look at the device, the way it works, and the people behind it.

Even the most honest of scientists are regularly misled by their cognitive biases. They often go to great lengths to find proof for whatever seems logical, while dismissing evidence to the contrary.

Yet this issue is rarely discussed — because it remains an embarrassing subject.

ITMO University operates an in-house business accelerator. In this series of articles, we’re going to take a look at some of its residents, starting with two machine vision projects: Labra and O.VISION.

The Department of Computer Science and Control Systems at ITMO University houses a robotics lab. In this article we’ll take a look at the projects its staff is working on, and show you the machinery on site: industrial manipulator robots, robotic hands and dynamic positioning system testing equipment.

ITMO University is home to a large number of labs that specialise on everything from bionics to quantum optics. Today we’ll take a look at the cyber-physical systems lab and its projects.

Hi, my name is Michael Kapelko. I'm a professional software developer. I'm fond of developing games and teaching folks to program.

Preface

Autumn 2019 was the third time I participated as one of the teachers in the course to teach 10-15-year-old folks to program. The course took place from mid. September to mid. December. Each Saturday, we were studying from 10 AM to 12 PM. More details about the structure of each class and the game itself can be found in the 2018 article.

I have the following goals for conducting such courses:

• create a convenient tool to allow the creation of simple games, the tool interested folks of 10 years old or older can master;
• create a program to teach programming, the program interested folks of 10 years old or older can use themselves to create simple games.

Master’s degrees are really useful. Postgrad education allows BA holders to put their new-found skills into practice, and secure great jobs further down the road. But students often need help assessing this choice, particularly if they majored in uncommon subjects — like photonics.

To set the record straight, we talked to the people behind, and the graduates of our MA programs in photonics and optical computing. In this article you’ll learn about part-time work available for photonics students, graduates’ job-hunting prospects, and the academic career options that open up.

The weekend is upon us, and so is the paralysis that comes with having nothing to do. Fear not, our editorial team picked 9 books on science and tech worth picking up on a cold winter day. You’ll learn about the history of space exploration, join a physicist on a surprisingly science-appropriate hike, and more.

More than 100 Azure services offer everything you need to build and run your applications with all the performance, redundancy, security, and scale that the cloud has to offer. But knowing where to begin with all these services can seem overwhelming. 

Read this e-book to build your cloud computing skills quickly and efficiently. You’ll be productive immediately, and when you finish, you’ll be well on your way to Azure mastery. 

Learn more below.

Why do some people get rich off of their ideas, and others are not able to reach even 100 customers? The renowned Stanford University, which is located in the heart of Silicon Valley, offers a course where students can learn the recipes for founding a successful startup. This course is also available as an audio podcast and on YouTube. Here are my takeaways from 20 lectures with such well-known teachers as Peter Thiel (PayPal), Paul Graham (Y Combinator), and Alex Schultz (Facebook).

Our support chats and some other indirect signs showed that there are many students among our free users. Here's the reason: PVS-Studio is now more often used by professors in courses related to software development. We are very pleased with this, and we decided to write this small article to fall under notice of other teachers. We are pleased that students become acquainted with the methodology of static code analysis in general and the PVS-Studio tool in particular. Our team will try to contribute to this trend.

Probably the largest hurdle when learning any new programming language is simply knowing where to get started. What’s important? What do I need to know to be proficient? It’s hard to follow docs when you’re not even sure what you’re reading.

You might be taking a look at Python. Maybe you’re drawn because of its popularity. Maybe you’re drawn to its flexibility. With Python you can create solutions of all shapes and sizes. You can dig into web development. Simplify your life through automation. Or maybe begin building the future with machine learning.

Picking up a new language is a common situation for modern-day developers. The days of going your entire career focused on one language are long since gone.

Fortunately, concepts typically don’t change as you move from one programming language to the next. Sure, the syntax might be different, but an if statement is still an if statement even when it’s written using { } or End If. So, we don’t need to learn how to program, but rather how to program in a new language.

This is why Susan and I created this series of videos! You might know how to write code, for example in JavaScript, Java or C# (or COBOL, or Bash, or… it doesn’t matter, really). Maybe you learned in a college course, online, or reading a book. So, you don’t need to be taught what an if statement is, but rather what an if statement looks like in Python.

Magento

Magento is an open-source PHP based platform for building e-commerce solutions. Built by the Magento company (now part of Adobe), it is used by over 350,000 developers all over the world. It enables the creation of highly customizable digital storefronts for Business-to-Customer and Business-to-Business purposes. Magento 2, the transformed version of the Magento E-commerce Platform, comes with brand new architecture, coding structure, and database design.

a) General overview

Magento’s platform is built upon PHP and MySQL. During its lifetime of 10 years (the version 1.0 released in March 2008 and the version 2.0 in November 2015, it has undergone changes in terms of structure and development patterns and is now in its second major version, Magento 2.

Magento’s structure is comprised of two main parts, one being the back-end, with the database and MySQL, and Model, Data and Service interfaces, as can be seen in figure 3. These are directly connected and used in Magento’s Blocks, Layouts, and Templates, which would be defined as the front-end of the application.

Here is tree with 3 levels to start your journey as web developer.

A coding bootcamp is a program of technical training teaching the programming skills that employers are looking for. Coding bootcamps allow students with low skills to concentrate on the most significant coding aspects and apply their new coding skills to solve real-world problems.

The goal of many bootcamp coding attendants is to move into a web development career. They do this by learning to build applications at a professional level – providing the foundation they need to build applications that are ready for production and demonstrating the skills they have to add real value to a potential employer.