Class-2006 Contest Winners Determined

Internet, September 27, 2006. We have the winners of Class-2006 contest held by Yandex. Eight authors of the best educational courses on information search will share RUB 1 million of the prize fund. In accordance with the rules of the competition, these materials will soon be made public, giving a possibility for teachers in all schools to use them free of charge.

The contest participants submitted a total of 29 projects. The jury included Yandex specialists, representatives of universities and research institutes, and information search system development companies. They faced a difficult task of selecting the best materials among many strong submissions. When choosing winners, the jury gave preference to courses actually used in teaching.

"We tried to select projects representing various related subjects and covering different audience levels. An important positive factor was the possibility of self-study using materials that will be published online," comments jury member Igor Nekrestyanov, Ph. D. (Mathematics and Mechanics Research Institute, Saint Petersburg State University). "When we evaluated the projects, we attempted to give recommendations and suggestions to all authors. We hope that the feedback will help make their courses even more interesting and useful."

The winning projects include both fundamental theoretical courses and those aimed at developing practical skills of Internet search. The subjects are quite diverse, encompassing fields from classic information retrieval to corpus linguistics and multimedia. The winner courses are taught in the Moscow State University, Saint Petersburg State University, Voronezh, Kazan, and Perm State Universities, the University of Turku (Finland), the Saint Petersburg State University for Information Technologies, Mechanics, and Optics, and the International Solomon University in Kiev.

"The purpose of our contest is to solve — at least partly — the pressing issue of a lack of modern Russian-language textbooks and educational materials on information search. The possibility of using complete and tested courses will help attract attention of university teachers to this interesting field of knowledge," explains Pavel Braslavski, Search Department project manager and associate professor of the Computer Engineering Department at the Urals State Technical University.

The open contest of educational courses on information search Class was announced in April 2006. The key objective of the contest is to create a bank of publicly accessible methodologies and teaching materials on information search and related disciplines. Yandex will continue supporting researchers and teachers working in the field of information search in the future.

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