It is believed that the Russian developments in the field of artificial intelligence are much inferior to the Western ones. However, it is not so. At the meeting in mid-July in Vancouver at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference GECCO 2014 representatives of the ITMO University have presented five reports. Igor Buzhinsky, the sixth-year student was awarded a diploma for the best work. 

In July of each year the world's largest conference on genetic and evolutionary computation, GECCO is traditionally held. In 2014, the venue for the international scientific forum was Vancouver. The conference consisted of a main part in which this time 180 speakers took part (only 33% of the number of works submitted for review). Also at the event a series of workshops were held where about 240 participants have made presentations.

Employees of the Department of computer technologies at the ITMO University have participated in the conference for the fourth time, presenting five reports. However, for the first time since 2011, students of the University were awarded by the results of the conference. Igor Buzhinsky, the sixth-year student (group 6536), was awarded a diploma for the best student presentation at the seminar of students and graduate students, held under the auspices of the Conference GECCO. Co-authors of the report were Daniel Chivilihin, Vladimir Ulyantsev and Fedor Tsarev.

Work entitled «Improving the quality of supervised finite-state machine construction using real-valued variables» is dedicated to the advancement of promising machines with a finite number of states, or finite state machines (FSM), by introducing new algorithms using real variables. The proposed approach allows the authors to create a machine with a finite number of states, a higher level by improving the previously used genetic algorithms.

We congratulate the authors of the report, and wish them success in the further research work!