DIGITAL UNIVERSITY

– Leonid Valentinovich, how many people today, excluding specialists, will be able to correctly explain what is hidden behind the word "digitalization"? Is it even possible to briefly, simply and intelligibly reveal the content of this concept?

– We are in a unique situation of a sharp change in the technological structure. Automation of various systems and processes has been going on for several decades, information systems are being introduced in all spheres of human activity. This process is very similar to how electrification took place at the beginning of the XX century: first it is a novelty attraction, then it is a convenient means of increasing labor efficiency, and as a result it is an integral part of all spheres of life. We are seeing the same thing now. The process of digitalization now, like the GOELRO Plan at the beginning of the last century, triggers those changes that are a response to global civilizational challenges and lead us to industry 4.0.

– What opportunities does the culture of using digital technologies open for us?

– In the process of mastering new technologies by society, there always comes a point of no return. That's why those who already use the benefits of digitalization will continue to successfully develop their competencies further, and those who do not use them will inevitably fall behind. This is an evolutionary process.

We already feel it, each for himself. The priority of state policy today is the maximum digitalization of the process of providing public services. In the future, any citizen will be able to receive all public services in electronic form, while transmitting only the information necessary to receive the service, and all reference data will be collected automatically from state databases. But in order for such systems to work effectively everywhere, a new digital culture must be formed, and all users of digital services must become its carriers.

Digitalisation in priority

– Does the strategic project of SSU "Digital University" have priority tasks? What will it be necessary to focus on first? What should ensure the successful digital development of our university in the coming years?

– "Digital University" is one of the five strategic projects of the Priority 2030 program. It is aimed at the digital transformation of the university in the field of education, science and management.

The main objectives of the project are the development of various digital services, platforms, products, as well as the training of IT specialists in accordance with the needs of companies in the real sector of the economy under secondary and additional vocational education programs. We will all have to master digital science, develop and consolidate university research areas in the field of artificial intelligence, big data analysis, and so on.

The process will be carried out through research, development of digital competencies, science-centered training of personnel, which in turn will be designed to ensure a rapid transition to digitalization. And this implies the improvement of training programs for IT specialists, and also introduces a completely new format of "digital departments" that will develop digital competencies for students of other fields of study - chemists, philologists, historians and others.

In words, it probably sounds somewhat abstract, but in fact digital technologies land on very specific vectors of university life, from incomprehensible, almost cosmic, they are already becoming quite tangible and real.

– Please use on some example to show the concept of artificial intelligence.

– During the student's studies at the university, a huge amount of data accumulates – his digital footprint. This is all data related to participation in the educational process, in social and cultural life, and living in a hostel. Artificial intelligence technologies allow us to analyze all these data together and identify implicit patterns.

For example, few people will think of comparing data on students' academic performance with their dorm room numbers. Although, as a result of such an analysis, it may turn out that the room number is significant: for example, the window overlooks a nightclub, the student sleeps poorly because of noise and therefore studies poorly. These are absolutely non-obvious relationships that we, relying on our personal professional experience, on the standard model of perception, overlook.

There is such a thing as data-based management. How does it differ from the classical formulation of the management problem? We have a large amount of data from different sources, there is a certain system that allows us to combine them. Further, the analysis of these data is carried out using both classical statistical methods and artificial intelligence methods. This is where the window of opportunity opens for the emergence of fundamentally new, breakthrough solutions.

development movement

– You are responsible for the policy of digital transformation and open data. What exactly will you and your colleagues have to work with?

– First of all, it is the hardware and software infrastructure and data. Digital transformation is a key process of the university's long–term development program. And it is impossible without a modern hardware and software infrastructure. The Priority 2030 program allowed for the first time in many years to update the university's network and server infrastructure on a large scale and introduce modern software solutions. For example, we have created a cluster of information systems servers based on 1C Enterprise, which now provides stable and significantly faster operation of all university information systems. The next step is to create a single data processing center (DPC), which will unite all the disparate computing resources of the university. The data center will provide many digital services for education and science.

Digital services are inextricably linked to data. For example, we have information on our website that is published for a wide user audience. For example, this is a class schedule or a telephone directory of the university. And can some third-party service take this data? The open data policy implies that a sufficiently extensive ecosystem of services is developing, allowing you to work with information not as a visual image, but as an array of data. Moreover, today universities are recommended to structure the information on the website in such a way that, for example, the Rosobrnadzor robot can immediately distribute pieces of information on reporting forms.

To the same extent, this applies to scientific information. The culture of digitalization in science is becoming critically important for scientists and the development of digital ways of scientific collaboration. There is a good practice in the scientific community to share the material collected during their experiments – tables, databases, and so on. There are already foreign journals for publishing "raw data". And there are search engines that index similar datasets. The author makes a link to a raw dataset, which can be found by a unique digital identifier (DOI, EDN or another).

I would like to emphasize that all these ambitious plans would have been impossible without the colossal infrastructure and personnel reserve that has been formed since the late 1990s by such high-class IT managers as Antonina Gavrilovna Fedorova, Vladimir Mikhailovich Solovyov, Valery Aleksandrovich Ivanov. They have brought up a team of excellent specialists, with whom we are now jointly responsible for the new stage of digitalization of SSU.

– Leonid Valentinovich, please answer this somewhat philistine question: how does big data differ from small data, and how will the university use it?

– Big data is formed in a situation when we accumulate information faster than we have time to analyze it using classical methods. For example, mobile operators face this regularly in their daily work, because the base stations register all calls and SMS, and this information accumulates at a tremendous speed. If we want to understand how closely people communicate with each other, the gender and age composition of the audience, whether there are any clusters of interests in this communication network, and so on, then this is already a task for big data. Systems aimed at working with big data quickly identify trends and make it possible to make the right management decision.

In the context of the university, there are no such tasks with super-large data, but we work with them as a scientific direction at different levels. We are developing the areas of artificial intelligence, big data and blockchain as the hottest modern technological trends. Somewhere at the level of elementary competencies, so that, relatively speaking, the same future teachers know about such technologies and can then inform those whom they teach. Somewhere at the level of specific usage, when, for example, a philologist was able to carry out a comparative analysis of texts for their similarity. And somewhere at the design level, when an IT specialist will build a neural network based on these conclusions and include it in solving applied problems. That is, we must teach not only those who build a neural network or develop a blockchain, but also those who will then use it or teach others.

The task of the university as an IT company implies a deep digital transformation of all university structures to move to a qualitatively new level of scientific, educational, managerial and communication processes. By the way, we have a very good background for this – we have been forming various databases since the mid-1990s. The databases on applicants were written back in the days when Windows was just entering our lives. They made it possible to accumulate this data, automatically print test and examination sheets, and monitor the quality of the contingent.

Now, within the framework of the Priority 2030 project, a pilot experiment is being conducted – the 1C: University system is being implemented on the basis of the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Chemistry. It implies that we keep a contingent of students electronically, we enter the statements electronically, the transfer order is prepared automatically. Relatively speaking, by pressing one button we determine which student has fully completed the training program for the current course and can be transferred to the next one, and who, unfortunately, turned out to be a candidate for expulsion. This system also allows applicants to go to the website and independently, in their personal account, download all the necessary data upon admission to the university.

The reaction of colleagues is positive. Our goal is to connect all educational structures to the system.

– The Digital University project involves, among other things, the preparation of "a new generation of humanities focused on digital science, the digitalization of humanitarian knowledge." What exactly is it about?

– Yes, there is an opinion that humanitarians do not need digital technologies. I disagree. There are humanitarian spheres in which digital tools, information systems, and, of course, gadgets fit very logically. In the digital world, there is a huge field for applying the efforts of philosophers, psychologists, lawyers, philologists – for example, automated text analysis.

– Leonid Valentinovich, what was your personal path to the world of digital technologies?

– I have been familiar with this world since childhood. Oddly enough, I was led to the figure by a completely classical institution – the library for children and youth named after Pushkin. When I was a preschooler, my parents took me there, and there was already an informatization department that dealt with the library catalog, and a computer literacy course was organized with it.

I was so fascinated by this case that I began to read special literature on my own, tried programming, attended various circles. Well, then it resulted in a lively interest in the process of studying at school. I passed computer science for the 11th grade as an external back in the 10th. Then he entered the SSU mehmat. Mathematical modeling is my main scientific interest, I defended my PhD thesis in the same specialty. The largest project in which he took part was from the Foundation for Advanced Research under the leadership of Professor, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences L.Y. Kossovich. We have been developing a system to support medical decision-making. I led a group of programmers.

Upon completion of the project, a proposal was received to head the Department of Digital and Information Technologies, to combine the resources that the university already has. For a year now, I have been building the architecture of the university's digital transformation, and, frankly, I see the huge opportunities that this strategic project opens up for us.

Interview by Tamara Korneva