MAI Trend: Information Technologies

Rapid development of the IT industry imposes on universities the need to train specialists with competencies corresponding to the demands of big industrial and IT companies. Moscow Aviation Institute is ready to meet the challenge.

Research and innovation related to digital development and creation of innovative software products are the main trends demanded in various sectors of economic activity today.

None of the modern rapidly developing areas of human activity changes the world as much as the information technologies. Due to them, such habitual actions as ordering a taxi or buying food are switching to an online-service model convenient for both the service provider and the consumer. Development and manufacturing of complex systems, like aircraft and ultra-modern vessels, require fewer resources because of supercomputer modelling and testing. Blockchain sets new safety standards allowing even political voting online. Robotics, Internet of Things, development of Artificial Intelligence, as well as AR/VR technologies are fundamentally changing approaches to the production and maintaining of complex equipment. Robots gather Hispanic oranges for us, and even in China, where labour force is abundance, largest high-tech production clusters are transferred to robotics chains. Assembly line workers are replaced by smart machines safely interacting with each other and people, but also by machine’s operator and service technicians. Entire classes of professions are disappearing and new ones are coming to replace them: personal data mentors, cryptocurrency, cyber-attacks forecasting or quantum computing specialists, virtual reality designer, online-doctor, etc.

Moscow Aviation Institute has opened ten new Master’s degree programs to train future IT-specialists, depending on labour market requirements. Each of them is in partnership with big companies: MTS, Avito, Sberbank, Ericsson, Rostelecom, HeadHunter, CROC, ivi, ozon.ru, Luxoft, HackerU, etc. MAI students gain profound knowledge in Augmented and Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data analysis, cloud services, Internet of Things, distributed computing, and digital manufacturing areas.

MAI Centre for Mathematical Modelling trains experts and emphasizes their efforts on the newest design directions, testing, certification and maintenance of aerospace equipment with supercomputer technologies application and mathematical modelling. It allows to reduce the time for production of new equipment.   

Youth entrepreneurship among students and employees is being developed at the Centre of Entrepreneurship on the MAI base. Support and advice on any idea or project is always available there. Acceleration programs for IT startups development are implemented with the assistance of the Internet Initiatives Development Fund. The participants study market, estimate their strength, and get acquainted with modern methods of start-up support.

MAI regularly holds hackathons with case studies from leading Russian and global companies, which are attended by hundreds of developers. MAI teams traditionally represent the university on Russian and international programming Olympiads. 

FUTURE HORIZONS IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY:

• Big Data analysis;
• Artificial Intelligence, primarily in medicine, finance and government sectors;
• Cloud solutions, creation of digital platforms;
• Creation of companies’ digital doppelgangers;
• Internet of Things (the average annual growth of this market in Russia will be almost 20% over the next 3 years);
• 5G networks;
• Block chain;
• Virtual and Augmented Reality technology;
• Autonomous systems (drones, robots, self-driving cars, etc.);
• Quantum technology.