Samsung R&D Institute Russia will host an online school for young Open Source developers

Samsung R&D Institute Russia (SRR) with its partners Arenadata and DeepPavlov.ai will host Community of Open Source Newcomers (COMMoN), an educational program that will give aspiring Open Source developers a chance to go all the way from a beginner to contributor in well-known Open Source projects under the guidance of experts from these projects. The school is organized in the framework of Samsung Open Source Conference Russia 2021 — a large-scale international event that has been held by Samsung Research annually in Korea since 2014 and will be held in Russia for the first time.

The classes at the COMMoN school will take place from August 16 to September 10. The training includes three educational tracks:

• «ROS — Samsung» track is dedicated to the Robot Operating System (ROS) platform — the largest and most well-known Open Source project in the field of robot control. The track will be led by Alexey Merzlyakov, SRR Lead Engineer, and Steve Macenski, Head of Open Source Robotics at Samsung Research America.

• «Arenadata DB» track is about the project of an open database based on the massively parallel DBMS Greenplum. This solution is used for IoT, machine learning, and data mining applications. The trainer of this track is Dmitry Yatsenko, the developer at track’s partner Arenadata.

• «DeepPavlov — MIPT» track is dedicated to building Multiskill AI assistants based on open platform for the development of voice assistants and chatbots DeepPavlov. The instructors of the track are specialists from DeepPavlov.ai and MIPT — Fyodor Ignatov and Danila Kornev.

The COMMoN educational program will start with general lectures on various aspects of Open Source project development. The mentors of general lectures include specialists from System Software Development Team at SRR with many years of experience in Open Source projects: Head of Platform Lab Ivan Maidansky and Expert Engineer Vyacheslav Barinov. They will teach students the basics of Opens Source development and its tools. Experts from the legal consulting company ESPE Nadezhda Kashchenko and Afanasy Shipunov, will teach students international licensing in the world of Open Source.

After finishing the general part of the program, the students will move to special lectures from track mentors and then, under their guidance, will develop own solutions for selected Open Source projects. At the end of the program, partner companies will choose the best students in their tracks. The main criteria for the assessment will be the solution relevance to the Open Source project, its functionality and code quality. Winners of each track will be announced and awarded at the closing of the Samsung Open Source Conference Russia in September 2021.

Studying at the Community of Open Source Newcomers school is free, the selection of the students is conducted on a competitive basis. Anyone can take tests to apply to the school. To apply the candidate needs to register on the SOSCON Russia 2021 website and select the COMMoN school in the registration form. The selection will be based on the results of online testing, which will be available until August 13, 2021.

 “The COMMoN online school will lead IT professionals to the special world of the international community of Open Source developers. I would like to sincerely thank the companies Arenadata and DeepPavlov.ai, who enthusiastically supported us in this initiative. Under the guidance of the experienced Open Source contributors of the projects that the school provides, students will be able to overcome barriers and contribute to the community. In addition, there will be a competitive component — the partner company will reward the best student in each track. We invite everyone who wants to contribute to the global Open Source movement and has required competencies to apply for participation in COMMoN”, commented Jin Guk Jeong, General Director of Samsung R&D Institute Russia, Vice President of Samsung Electronics.

Samsung R&D Institute Russia was opened in Moscow in 1993 and now employs over 300 highly qualified specialists. The SRR is recognized for its extensive scientific and engineering research, which enables it to successfully integrate cutting-edge technology into Samsung devices. The SRR implements internship programs for university students. Specialists of SRR have developed educational programs for social projects «Samsung IT School», «Samsung IT Academy», as well as open online courses on artificial intelligence for the Stepik platform.