INTERNATIONAL SAMSUNG OPEN SOURCE CONFERENCE 2021 HELD IN RUSSIA

The Samsung Open Source Conference Russia 2021 (SOSCON Russia 2021) was held in Moscow on September 15, 2021. This large-scale annual event for Open Source SW (OSS) developers has been held annually by Samsung Research since 2014. This year, the event took place for the first time in Russia with the support of Samsung R&D Institute Russia (SRR).

The conference was broadcast in three languages: Russian, English, and Korean. Samsung Research and companies contributed to well-known OSS projects that participated in SOSCON Russia 2021. The event was moderated by Dr. Timur Biyachuev, Head of SRR System Software Team.

Welcome speeches were made by: Dr. Sebastian Seung, President and Head of Samsung Research, Dr. Jinguk Jeong, Vice President and Head of SRR, and Dr. Arutyun Avetisyan, Academic of RAS and Head of ISP RAS. Next in the plenary session, Kevin Xu, GitHub Senior Director and Head of International Expansion Strategy made a presentation “How to Support the Next 50 million Open Source Developers”. OpenCV co-founder Vadim Pisarevsky talked about the most popular computer vision framework. Samsung IT School graduate and now a student of MIREA University Fedor Sedov shared his successful experience of participating in an international OSS project.

The conference included a panel discussion “Business and Open Source — Frenemies?”, in which experts discussed the competitive advantages, risks, and business models of OSS projects together with the moderator Yevgeny Zuyev, well-known compiler developer and Professor at Innopolis University. Discussion participants were Head of SRR SoC Team Vyacheslav Garbuzov, Head of Yandex ClickHouse Development Alexey Milovidov, Head of OMP OS Development and Services Department Roman Alyautdin, and Chairman of the BazAlt Board of Directors Alexei Smirnov.

17 session presentations covered a wide range of the conference topics.

System OSS topic was presented by Alexei Merzlyakov (SRR) and Steve Masensky (SRA) in a report about ROS Navigation 2 Stack Project, as well as Denis Silakov (Virtuozzo), Gleb Balykov (.NET 6, SRR), and Pasha Finkelstein (Kotlin, JetBrains).

Increasingly popular projects with AI tools were discussed in presentations by Olga Perepelkina (OpenFL, Intel), Stanislav Kirillov (Catboost, Yandex), Alexei Bochkovsky (YOLOv4, Intel), and Daniela Kornev (DeepPavlov, IFTI).

Vigorous stories by the founders of a successful business on OSSwere presented by Dmitry Petrov (DVC, Iterative.ai) and Artem Keydunov (Cube Dev).

Dina Safin (Apache Airflow, Mail.Ru Group), Alexei Chernokur (Arenadata), and Peter Savchenko (CodeX) spoke about the work with OSS project’s communities.

A new phenomenon in hardware, the open RISC-V processor architecture and its applications, was presented by Yuri Myakochin (Milandr).

Taras Ivashchenko (OWASP, OZON) spoke about solutions for application’s information security. Alexei Bataiev (Intel) told us about the development history and future of the OpenMP standard. Nadezhda Kashchenko (ESPE Legal Consultancy) presented a useful report for all developers entitled “Copyleft and Copyright. Freedom and rights. Case Studies from Our Practice”.

In addition, the conference announced the winners of “Community of Open Source Newcomers” (COMMoN). COMMoN is an educational program for novice developers of OSS that took place in the framework of the conference from August 16 to September 10. The COMMoN school was organized into three educational tracks by Samsung in conjunction with Arenadata and DeepPavlov.ai. The school received great interest from the developers. The selection competition attracted more than 11 applications for each place.  91 people were accepted for three tracks of the program. After lectures and consultations with track coaches, COMMoN listeners were tasked with developing code that would be useful for the OSS project. The coaches identified the best work, noted perseverance, hard work, and a sincere willingness to contribute.

The winners of the track «Samsung-ROS»:

• 1st place — Andrei Ryzhikov;
• 2nd place — Alexei Melkobrodov.

The winners of the track «DeepPavlov»:

• 1st place — Mashkin Anatoly, Dmitry Babayev;
• 2nd place — Sergeyenko Egor, Skiba Gleb.

The winners of the track «Arenadata DB»:

• 1st place — Anton Pichugin;
• 2nd place — Ginsburg Georgi, Bessonov Maxim, Shevtsov Yuri;
• 3rd place — Sofia Mikhailova, Alexey Nazarov, Vladimir Belov.

«Russia is famous for its engineering talent and its Open Source communities are contributing to Computer Vision, System Software, Databases and many more areas. Based on this strong foundation in Russia, Samsung is committed to expand awareness and grow developer participation in the Open Source movement. Engaging local Open Source communities is essential for building advanced future technologies, and for tackling current and new global challenges through collaboration, openness and trust», — said Sebastian Seung, President and Head of Samsung Research, in his welcome speech.

«I am proud to be a part of Samsung R&D Institute Russia. It is one of the oldest Samsung R&D centers outside Korea, with its almost a 30 years’ history of technology advancement and innovation. Our developers contributed to many Samsung products and helped to strengthen company competency System SW, AI imaging, Sensor Solutions and Optics. Samsung R&D Institute Russia has been contributing to many projects in various domains, ranging from System SW to AI. Engineers from our research center have been contributing to Open Source projects for several years. They are deeply involved in compiler projects, such as GCC and LLVM. Important contributions were done in networking domain, such as Open vSwitch-DPDK. In addition, some projects were started in Samsung R&D Institute Russia. For example, lightweight JavaScript engine for resource-constrained devices — JerryScript or distributed machine learning platform VELES. Recent Open Source activity includes the development of advanced features for Navigation2 stack for Robot Operating System. And we are not going to stop on this. We will continue to contribute to Open Source as we believe in open and collaborative environment. It can provide the best outcome to bring new advanced technologies to life», — commented Jeong Jinguk, Vice President and Head of Samsung R&D Institute Russia.

All conference videos in Russian can be found on Samsung IT Academy YouTube channel in the playlist «Samsung Open Source Conference Russia 2021». Videos in English can be found at SOSCON’s YouTube channel playlist.

The Samsung R&D Institute Russia was opened in Moscow in 1993, and today employs more than 300 highly qualified professionals. SRR has gained recognition for its extensive scientific and engineering developments, which have enabled it to successfully introduce advanced technology into Samsung devices. SRR runs internship programs for university students. SRR specialists have developed educational programs for social projects “Samsung IT School”, “Samsung IT Academy”, as well as AI open online courses on the Stepik platform.