Education

Cisco and the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) have agreed to pool their efforts in improving the training of Russian innovation managers and doing joint R&D, according to a source at Cisco Systems Russia.

The cooperation was formally agreed upon in the wake of a meeting held on April 24 by the Innovation Working Group of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission in Washington, DC.

Russia’s Tirnet is one of 30 companies in the world that will receive funding this year as part of the Google RISE Award 2013, which supports education initiatives. RISE, which stands for Roots in Science and Engineering, provides funding and support to organizations internationally that are working on education in science and technology. The grant will be used by Tirnet to develop an English language version its product and to promote it to the international education community.

Intel has announced it will open an updated training and research laboratory at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics (CMC) at Moscow State University (MSU). The expanded cooperation between the industry leader and the university will allow students and faculty to develop new courses and solve research problems relevant to the industry in conjunction with leading experts from Intel.

According to a report from online news portal Lenta.ru quoting BBC News, the Russian education system is ranked 20th in the world according to a recent study by the Economist Intelligence Unit. First place is held by Finland, with the remaining top five positions being held by South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore.

Britain ranked sixth, followed by the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland and Canada. The U.S. took 17th place in the ratings, just above Hungary and Slovakia which are in 18th and 19th place respectively.

RIA Novosti reports that the Tatarstan government has allocated $1 million for grants to foreign specialists so that they can conduct research in the field of IT technologies, quoting the republic’s Ministry of Information and Communications.

Russian news service RIA Novosti reports that iCarnegie, the technology arm of Carnegie Mellon University, has announced plans to open an IT training center in what is now developing as Innopolis, an ‘innovation city’ outside of Kazan. The city is the capital of Tatarstan, an autonomous republic of the Russian Federation.

The international educational and training facility will reportedly have the capacity to train as many as 5,000 IT specialists and business managers a year for both regional and national IT projects and is expected to start enrolling students next year.

Cisco has launched several long-term initiatives aimed at the development and modernization of information technology education in Russia. The initiatives, which were announced in August, will offer professional training for schoolteachers and educational specialists and deliver a free-of-charge course on IT essentials from the Cisco Networking Academy portfolio to be taught in Russian schools through 2014.

Students from the Tomsk University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics (TUSUR) have created a new Russian-German mobile phrasebook application for Android-based smartphones, according to reports in the Tomsk Obzor newspaper.

Christened Ru-De Phrasebook Pro, the product was reportedly created as part of Mobile Applications project training.

The Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH) and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have each announced the opening of a program in computational linguistics. The two programs were developed in close cooperation with ABBYY and IBM, according to ABBYY, a leading Russia-based international supplier of linguistic and translation software and services set up in 1989 by an MIPT student.