Faculty of Computer Science Opening Joint Department with the Russian Academy of Sciences

On September 22, a presentation will take place marking the opening of a new joint department with the Institute for System Programming (ISP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The joint department is being created as part of the School of Software Engineering of the Faculty of Computer Science. The joint department will add to the Computer Science Faculty’s academic and pedagogical activities by offering system programming, a core area of programming research.

‘The opening of the Joint Department with the ISP is an important step in the Faculty of Computer Science’s development,’ the Dean of the Faculty, Ivan Arzhantsev, notes. ‘At the core of all the faculty’s educational programmes lies the concept of combining fundamental science, applied research, and project-based work. In carrying out this principal, it is extremely important that we work with leading academic institutions. In fact, the Software Engineering programme has been working with the ISP for quite some time already, and the creation of the joint department formalises and expands this cooperation,’ he adds.

Since September 2014, more than 15 software engineering students have begun studying within the ISP as part of an academic research seminar where students are separated among the institution’s various divisions. This provides students with in-depth coursework on key research areas. This academic year, the number of such students is doubling. Also starting this year, courses that are part of the joint department will be hosted both at the Faculty of Computer Science and at the ISP itself.  

This is not the first time students from the Faculty of Computer Science will have completed a summer internship within the ISP. Graduates of the bachelor’s and master’s programmes regularly go work at the ISP or attend graduate school there.

The areas of research and applied development that the joint department will be involved in will coincide with the main areas of research carried out by the ISP:

• Programming methodology, software engineering, new programming paradigms
• Operating systems
• Programming languages
• Databases and knowledge bases
• Parallel and distributed systems
• Computer networks
• Intellectual systems
• Discrete mathematics

The Joint Department with the ISP will hold special classes and seminars for students on contemporary aspects of system programming, thereby introducing them to developers, organising schools and conferences, and getting students involved in academic research, the results of which might be published in English-language publications available abroad. The department will also organise an internship for students at ISP.

The head of the department will be Viktor Ivannikov, a member of Russian Academy of Sciences, the creator and first director of the Institute for System Programming, and the editor-in-chief of the journal Programming. Ivannikov is also a member of international academic societies such as the ACM and IEEE Computer Society, and he is the head of IEEE Computer Society’s Russian division.

A presentation on the joint department will take place on September 22 in the Euclid lecture hall. Ivan Arzhantsev and Viktor Ivannikov will speak at the event. Professor Alexander Petrenko, who is in charge of the ISP’s programming technologies division, will give a lecture entitled ‘The Verification and Development of Responsible Software: An Atypical Practice.’