Summer School in Harbin: INRTU Students Studied AI and Digital Economy

Students of INRTU’s Baikal School of BRICS took part in the HIT Global Summer School (HITGSS). The program lasted from July 7 to 17 at the Harbin Institute of Technology (Heilongjiang Province, PRC).

Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) is one of the oldest and leading technical universities in China. Today, it is a large multidisciplinary research center. Every year, the university holds HIT Global Summer School (HITGSS), which combines about 20 programs.

This summer, students of the Baikal School of BRICS went to Harbin. Maria Unagaeva and Dmitry Aksenov chose the track “Digital Economy and Intelligent Decision”.

Maria is studying in the specialty “Economic Security”. According to her, the course turned out to be extremely relevant to her future profession. While studying at the School, the student sought to broaden her knowledge and understand the essence of the economic situation abroad.

“Studying at Harbin Institute of Technology was significantly different from the usual course of classes at Irkutsk Polytechnic. The schedule was structured so that we had two classes per day. This only seems like a light schedule at first glance. One lecture lasted three hours with short breaks of 10 minutes. Some lectures were so intense and fascinating that even this time was not enough for us,” Maria noted.

The student said that the summer school participants were also taught ways to implement digitalization in various professional fields.

“The teachers demonstrated the work of artificial intelligence with examples from completely opposite spheres: medicine, marketing, transport, education. For example, in medicine, AI is used for diagnostics with accuracy of over 95%, and in transport – for real-time traffic management,” explains Maria Unagaeva.

Second-year student Dmitry Aksenov shared his opinion about the trip. He believes he gained valuable knowledge in the field of writing research papers. He also understood how highly personal motivation and active student participation in the educational process are valued in China.

“There were many classes from invited teachers on the course. They were conducted exclusively in a lecture format without seminars. A fundamentally new understanding for me was how a properly executed research paper should be structured and formatted”.

In addition, a cultural program was organized for the students. During the excursions, they visited such iconic city landmarks. For example, they visited Zhongyang Pedestrian Street, which leads to the monument in honor of the city's defenders from the Songhua River flood. The Irkutsk residents also took a cable car to Sun Island and visited the “Dragon Tower” – the tallest tower in Asia.