4. The Great Mathematical Workshop 2022 successfully finished in Novosibirsk, Tyumen and Tomsk

The Great Mathematical Workshop 2022 successfully finished in Novosibirsk, Tyumen and Tomsk

19.08.2022
Fr om July 24 to August 13, the team of the Mathematical Center in Akademgorodok and our colleagues fr om Tyumen and Tomsk held a project intensive course aimed at solving real problems of science and industry — the Great Mathematical Workshop (GMM).

In 2022, the Workshop was held in person for the first time. In total, 147 participants successfully completed work at GMM at three sites, which is more than 90% of those who started working on projects.

The head of GMM 2022 Timur Nasybullov, deputy director of the Mathematical Center in Akademgorodok, says:

The offline format of the organization of the Great Mathematical Workshop has an undoubted advantage of high work efficiency. We are pleasantly surprised that only a few left the projects without waiting for their completion. At the Workshop, the work is really very intense, and the atmosphere of being on campus all together was conducive to active interaction both within the project and within the stream. And indeed the entire Workshop!

According to the organizers, the second week of the intensive was no less productive than the first one. However, it is too early to sum up the final results: As one of the organizers of the GMM-2022, the head of the department for relations with industrial partners of the Mathematical Center in Academgorodok Sergey Ospichev notes, the practice of the two previous Workshops shows that many teams will not stop at writing popular science notes, but will issue results in the form of full-fledged scientific papers, grant applications or custom R&D. One example of such a case is the work of a project team on the use of machine learning to sel ect the best loan. The study will be continued as part of the R&D collaboration between the company and researchers from the MCA.

Sergey adds: 

The workshop is an excellent platform wh ere you can test your idea in a short period of time and create a reserve for further cooperation.

Daria Shestakova, a student of the Engineering School of the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of NSU (DMM NSU), shared her impressions of participating in the Workshop. For her, this format is not new: last year, Dasha was the curator of the school project "Automation of recognition of a printing defect on a 3D printer." And this year I wanted to see how it is to be a participant in the project.

Daria told us: 

I participated in the project "Oncology tools: how data analysis helps in the search for oncogenes." This is a project fr om the now popular field — bioinformatics. We had a dataset of 105 experiments: for each sample, we had genome sequences and the result of an experiment on colorectal cancer. The task was to determine the presence of an oncological disease in a patient by the presence of a chemical change in DNA. The first week we were engaged in the preparation of biological data: we aligned the genome, mastered the Bismark and PySam bioinformatic utilities, and understood the process of genome sequencing together with the customer. During the second module, we already worked with machine learning algorithms. For the Workshop, we learned to separate patients with cancer. We checked our results in the genome browser and, indeed, some of the proposed intervals were associated with colorectal cancer. But this is only a small step towards solving the problem.

This year, the Workshop has significantly expanded its horizons in terms of the topics of projects and the age of participants — with the advent of the pedagogical flow and the expansion of the flow of projects for high school students, participants with an age difference of more than 40 years worked at the Workshop.

Anastasia Karpenko, head of the pedagogical stream, deputy dean for development of DMM NSU, comments:

The workshop was conceived and actually turned out to be a platform wh ere people with different backgrounds communicate: in terms of expertise, education, work experience, and even, it turns out, age. And, what is even more important, the communication is very productive. Thus, the team of the "Teaching Mathematics" project was able not only to design an educational intensive, but also to conduct it with real schoolchildren-participants. Moreover, it was possible to analyze the feedback in dynamics and adjust the developments. I hope that next year we will be able to involve more schoolchildren and teachers in the development of current projects