Literature review, comparison, and analysis of existing solutions constitute a significant part of a thesis manuscript.  In the last three years, AI chats have dramatically intervened in the thesis preparation workflow. The ability of AI chats to analyze and compare discourages students from acting as the primary drivers of research and instead encourages their passive reliance on AI-generated content. This situation makes manuscripts eclectic and lacks focus. The theoretical part disconnects from the computational experiments. As a result, the audience is reluctant to read students' manuscripts. Ironically, they use AI chats to summarise the manuscripts to extract their main contributions. We are proud to say that our thesis works do not suffer from this AI distortion. We are grateful to our students, especially our bachelor’s and master’s alumni, who have carefully prepared and successfully defended their theses, producing clear, well-founded, and meaningful results. Our thesis manuscripts are designed for public discussion and rigorous scientific analysis. Each thesis presents a clear research idea grounded in the fundamentals of machine learning. It includes a theoretical justification, a repository with the source code of the computational experiments, and slides. Videos of the pre-defence sessions are uploaded to our YouTube channel “Intelligent Systems”: Bachelors & Masters.

As we wrap up another year, it's time to look back at what our department has accomplished. 2025 brought us 42 published papers spanning fundamental ML theory, applied AI systems, and cutting-edge optimization methods—from transformer Hessians and generative models to hallucination detection and matrix-oriented optimizers.

Beyond publications, our students won competitions and defended their theses: 14 Bachelor's, 9 Master's, 3 PhD, and 1 DSc dissertations. They also launched ambitious group research projects. Three of our faculty and alumni received the prestigious Yandex ML Prize, and our head Konstantin Vorontsov was inducted into the Hall of Fame. If you read our summer overview of thesis defences or last winter's year-in-review for 2024, this post continues that story with the next chapter.

In this year-in-review, we dive into the research highlights, share stories from our educational programs, and celebrate the community that makes it all possible.

The students of the Intelligent Systems Department successfully defended their bachelor’s and master’s theses. This year, 14 Bachelor’s and 8 Master’s students earned their degrees in Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Sciences. We are proud to say that our Department is unique in publishing the complete set of defense materials during the last ten years. These materials include the text of the dissertation work, the published papers, the code of the computational experiments, and the slides with video of the defense talk.

In this post, we gladly summarize the defended works of our BS and MS students and highlight the results. A recording of their pre-defence presentations can be found here and here in Russian. Most part of the theses has a publicly available English version. 

The goal of the Intelligent Systems Department is to facilitate the road to high-quality professional life. The Ph.D. degree requires three publications in peer-reviewed journals. They are the core of the student’s thesis. This year each of our bachelor students delivered at least one publication. It means they pave the road to their Ph.D. To facilitate this, the Department provides state-of-the-art research topics, scientific advisors with excellence in science, and fine-tuned educational courses. Below, we are proud to recognize our students for their outstanding achievements.

Введение

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Время от времени в мире анализа данных проходят конкурсы с большими денежными призами. В 2006 году компания Netflix объявила о соревновании на миллион долларов по предсказанию оценок фильмов пользователями на основе их предпочтений. В 2019 году AWS, Facebook, Microsoft и другие компании объявили о конкурсе по распознаванию дипфейков Deepfake Detection Challenge с призом в $500,000 за первое место. Да и вообще такие многобюджетные конкурсы проводятся всё чаще и чаще, как видно в таблице ниже. В начале 2020 года в России стартовал конкурс «ПРО//ЧТЕНИЕ», не уступающий этим соревнованиям ни по масштабам, ни по амбициозности задачи. Организаторы конкурса «ПРО//ЧТЕНИЕ» предлагают разработать систему, проверяющую сочинения ЕГЭ по пяти школьным предметам. Общий призовой фонд конкурса составляет 260 млн руб., что с лёгкостью обгоняет описанные выше конкурсы. Участвовать может каждый, и окончательные итоги пока не подведены.