Samsung’s free online Computer Vision course wins Stepik Awards

Samsung Research Russia won the Stepik Awards, the first held by the largest Russian educational platform Stepik. Among the 100 courses submitted for the award, in the nomination «Best Course from New Authors», open course of Mikhail Romanov and Igor Slinko «Neural Networks and Computer Vision» was announced the winner.

The award took place at the annual Stepicon conference, which was held on September 27-28 in St. Petersburg. Svetlana Yun, the head of educational programs, took part in the conference and award ceremony from Samsung’s side.

The open online course «Neural Networks and Computer Vision» was launched on the Stepik educational platform on the 1^st June this year and over the past 4 months has attracted 17.5 thousand students, receiving many grateful reviews and high marks. Authors of the course Mikhail Romanov and Igor Slinko, graduates of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, experts from the SAIC-Moscow (SAIC-Moscow, while practicing machine learning tasks, made difficult material accessible to a wide range of specialists. The launch of the course was preceded by many months of work with testing materials at the Samsung AI Bootcamp 2018 summer school, shooting video lectures, developing practical assignments in a team with Samsung R&D Institute Russia employees involved in the company’s social educational programs.

The course «Neural Networks and Computer Vision» for university students in IT area of training and professional developers is designed for 6 weeks, consists of 7 modules of video lectures and practical tasks (3-5 hours a week), which consistently sets out the terminology and principles of building neural networks, tells about modern tasks, optimization methods, ways to simplify and speed up their work. The course ends with a solution of the computer vision applied problem.

Graduates receive a course certificate from Samsung and Stepik.org. Already twice in August and September, ten graduates who got the highest rating received an offer to be interviewed at Samsung Research Russia.

“Samsung’s social and educational programs are the company’s contribution to the development of the IT industry and the digital economy of Russia. With the help of cooperation with the Stepik platform, we got the opportunity to share the expertise of our best employees with a very motivated Russian-speaking audience. We are going to continue, the work is going on and the number of free courses will only grow. I believe that this will help us to open up new professional horizons for the world of artificial intelligence to as many students and specialists as possible!” — commented Jin Wook Lee, CEO of Samsung Research Russia and Head of SAIC-Moscow.

Link to the course: https://stepik.org/course/50352/promo/