‘I like lots of things about HSE University but first of all, its students.’
Oleg Svidchenko, St Petersburg School of Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science
I got my bachelor's and master's degrees at HSE University-St Petersburg, majoring in 'Applied Mathematics and Information Science'.
My main research interests focus on reinforcement learning—a subdirection of machine learning which studies interactive communication between an agent and a certain environment.
This sphere attracts me primarily because agents learn not from the predefined correct answers (like it happens in supervised learning tasks) but thanks to the reward function—metrics which indicate the correctness of the task solving in general. In my opinion, in the future, such an approach will help to teach AI to solve various tasks with greater efficiency than a person can as well as develop complex automated systems for which it is impossible to create a clear algorithm for task solving.
At the moment, I am a co-author of four published papers about reinforcement learning. Three of them are articles published following the results of competitions 'NeurIPS' of different years.
I started teaching at HSE University back when I was still studying in the master's programme—I delivered practical classes on the introduction to machine learning. Later, in a couple of years, I started delivering the course in 'Deep Reinforcement Learning' individually.
I like lots of things about HSE University but first of all, its students. Students who enrol in our programmes are very motivated and interested in gaining knowledge. That is why it is very pleasant to teach them and tell them about things they are passionate about.