“Kamil, for many years Intel has been holding a wide variety of competitions. What is the purpose of these competitions – is it always the same or does it depend on the objectives in specific spheres?”
“Yes indeed, Intel has held various competitions for a long time, including some in Russia. They have similar aims, but nevertheless they are not the same from competition to competition. Ten years ago I was working with educational programmes in Intel and I would organise competitions in universities. Their aim was to establish contacts with people who wanted, and had the ability, to cooperate with our corporation. That is probably an objective of all the competitions that we organise. For example, Intel is opening up a new area of research and development in Russia, and we need to know which people here can set the tone, and what they are. The search for people is the aim that runs through any competition that we initiate.”
“However, other companies producing hardware solutions and software also run similar competitions. Does the Intel initiative have any specific features?”
“In actual fact it’s difficult to compare the competitions run by various companies, so I shall only talk about the competitions that Intel holds. In order to compare them, you have to be involved in organising the competitions that other organisations hold. But I imagine that from the point of view of the systems for staging them, all similar competitions have a lot in common and their aims are similar. The differences are determined by the people who organise them: they’re the ones who add the specifics.”
“It is understandable that in terms of developing the ecosystem such events are a powerful incentive. Has Intel managed to acquire new reliable partners as a result of the competitions that have been held, or to attract promising staff to work in specific areas within the company? How do you evaluate success in this respect?”
“Of course, we don’t expect that every competition will enable us to attract partners or staff, but it does happen, and that is one of the results of our competition activity in general. There is one category of competitions that we haven’t mentioned yet – that is competitions among university students and post-graduate students with the aim of identifying people who can be awarded Intel bursaries. The very first such competition enabled us to employ a valuable colleague – Andrei Syomin, whom you know well. Andrei was the winner in the first bursary competition that Intel held in Moscow University. We attracted students to it from three faculties: computer mathematics and cybernetics, mechanics and mathematics, and physics. In all about 100 people took part and there were five winners, one of whom – Andrei Syomin, today a successful Intel staff member – works in our office in Munich and is well known as a specialist in the field of high-performance computing. There are other examples of winners of Intel competitions held among students helping universities and companies to acquire valuable members of staff.”
“The competition that we are discussing was originally geared towards high-performance computing, and that was understandable. After all, this topic is not very common, to put it mildly: it needs to be popularised and developed, and people who work with it need to be encouraged. Why did the need arise to expand the range of projects that will be submitted to the competition this year? Wouldn’t it be simpler to organise a new competition from scratch?”
“A good project takes years to develop, during which time the range of contacts widens. and that is a very important benefit from any competition. And there is always the temptation to use work received in previous years. We have modified the high-performance computing competition which Intel held in previous years, and now it will be devoted to developments for the whole computer continuum, from supercomputers to mobile devices. On the one hand these are signs of the evolution of a successful initiative, and on the other, a desire to expand the objective. As long as we say that modern people are surrounded in their lives by the most varied computer devices, many of which are very important to them – those which are usually in their pocket (the mobile phone) or sitting on the desk. But there are also others, that we don’t notice: servers, data processing centres and the ‘cloud’ services performed on the basis of these. The evolution of the competition for high-performance computing solutions into a competition for solutions for the computer continuum underlines the principle that the computer world is huge and varied, and all its components are important for modern people, each in their own way.”
“However, there is particular software for high-performance computers and a particular way of writing software for client devices. How are you planning to strengthen your work in the area of finding talent that can write programs for clients? Will this approach differ from what was done before?”
“All the projects that are accepted for consideration contain a programming component. True, it doesn’t all come down to programming. After all, this isn’t an applications competition, it’s a competition about solutions, which can include various elements. A client device includes many components, from hardware components to the operating system and the applications running in its environment.
“How do we plan to strengthen our work with the ecosystem? That is an excellent question which concerns not only this competition but in general much of what we do. The ecosystem of the developers – what is known in our terminology as independent software vendors (ISV) – is extremely important for Intel, because it creates the software element of the stack. And that is the most important component solution that the user can buy. Competitions are one element in our work with this ecosystem.
“As you know, Intel has a whole division for cooperating with developers (the Developers Relations Division, DRD), and a whole range of programmes geared towards them is in operation. The purpose of DRD’s work is to rally the ecosystem around Intel in a natural way. But the software companies also need to realise the value of cooperation. Intel is constantly brining new platforms onto the market and creating new processors, and software has to work on them very well. But apart from providing our key partners with new models of our products in a timely manner, what else can we do? The competition is aimed at the visible part of the iceberg of the software development ecosystem. But its lower part is of no less interest to us, and the role of our DRD colleagues in developing it is extremely important. We hope that the programs they develop are important and of interest to our partners. This is one of the examples lying on the surface: the AppUp apps store. It hasn’t started working in Russia yet, but it is working in other countries, and the world is not all that big. Therefore Russian developers have the opportunity to write apps and to put them in the Intel apps store – these are programs for mobile devices and various operating systems, starting with Windows and ending with MeeGo. This is an important catalyst for the development of the ecosystem, and we shall be using it. We hope that next year the apps store will start working in Russia. And before that we shall open a similar project, not AppUp but something ideologically very close, an apps store that we want to launch so that we can have the opportunity to cooperate with developers on this theme.”
“How are the organisers of the competition decided? Is this based on the previous history of their mutual relations?”
“If a competition is held several years in a row, obviously there are traditions, there is a history of relations. Now, the high-performance computing (HPC) competition would be a suitable example to consider. Its ecosystem is not all that great, and all the strong players here are well known, every one of them. The joint organisers and joint founders of the competition were the most well-known and respected members of this ecosystem. And they have a history of good relations. We know these people well enough and we invite those whom professionals in this field expect to see on the jury. If we make changes – as we did this year – we create a combination of the old and the new. Since HPC is a part of what we call the ‘computer continuum’, in a natural way those who were joint organisers of previous competitions become part of the new one. But as soon as the subject matter has expanded, we also need people and companies that understand the new themes that used not to exist. Since we have less experience here, and there often simply is no previous history of relations, the decisions are taken on the basis of tactical considerations – in the good sense of that word. There are projects that are today attracting the attention of the scientific community. One of them is Skolkovo. Naturally, we wanted to propose partnership with Skolkovo is organising such a competition. It was a simple thought, lying on the surface. And the Skolkovo Foundation met us halfway. Or the ABBYY company – one of the best-known Russian software brands. The applications which they are developing and bringing to the market are, from our point of view, promoting the rapid development of client devices which is being observed today. And a clear link is emerging between the competition which we thought up and the ABBYY company. We have therefore also asked them to be joint organisers. To put it briefly, the group of founders is a result of the interaction of historical reasons and links that have been built up on the one hand, and our desire to promote the development of areas of the IT industry that are new for us on the other.”
“With regard to geography: as I understand it, this competition will mainly be Russian in nature, but of course it is well known that the IT specialists in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other countries of the CIS are very strong. Are there plans to do something to expand the geography of the conference, and if yes, then how?”
“In general terms, we don’t have any geographical restrictions. I can’t recall seeing the phrase ‘only for Russian companies’ in the terms and conditions, and I don’t believe this should be the case, because applications come in by email and via the website, and that’s the Internet, a field without borders. There are no obstacles to prevent citizens of Belarus, Ukraine or Kazakhstan taking part in our competition. In general, we could also accept applications from faraway countries, for example from Israel, but the question of efficient dissemination of information arises here: will we be able to get information about the fact that the competition exists to potential participants in these countries? It’s simpler for us to inform people who live in Minsk, Kiev and Almaty than those who live in Tel Aviv.”
“If we can turn to technical competence, in your view, is the percentage of defective work in entries to the competition too high? How does the situation look ‘at the front door’?”
“This percentage varies from one competition to another, and even more so within the same competition if it is held for several years. In terms of content this is a complex competition: it’s not a competition for children’s drawings or, say, flash animation. The jury works with entries with a high degree of intellectual content. Therefore even drawing up the terms and conditions of the competition clearly is a very difficult job. And we end up learning together with the participants. When a competition is being held for the first time, the percentage of strong entries is lower – we observed this in the first high-performance computing competition. But both the quantity and the quality of entries has risen from year to year. People are learning, the proportion of strong projects is growing, and the percentage of defective work, as you say, is declining. I think that when we make changes as drastically as we did this year, it’s natural to expect that the percentage of strong entries will decline slightly, but that’s normal. Everything will be put right next year and beyond.”
“And here’s a common situation: suppose my exceptionally useful and interesting program for a client device won the competition, but I live in the Far East. To pick up my prize I’d need to spend a lot on a flight from Vladivostok and pay for a hotel in Moscow, because you couldn’t get there and back in a day. What should I do?”
“This is a problem that can be solved. I’m probably not going to make any 100% promises – you couldn’t call the competition’s budget unlimited, and the lion’s share of it has to be spent on the prizes. But if we have winners from remote regions of the country, we’ll help. Incidentally, experience shows that people who are strong candidates and capable of winning the competition, as a rule are not living in poverty. I can’t recall a case in recent years of anyone not being able to come from Novosibirsk, for example, for valid reasons. If such a person should appear, I think we would find a way of enabling them to come all the same and collect their prize in person. But more often it’s different: people are very busy, and they physically don’t have the time, so they can’t always come.”
“To conclude our conversation, I would like to ask you to give some advice to participants in the competition, to send them a message. What would you like to say to them?”
“Of course, I would strongly urge them to take part. I’ll try to explain in detail how the motivation for taking part in the competition might look from my point of view. We are witnessing the latest round in the development of the IT industry, and this round is characterised by the rapid spread of client devices. The shape and structure of our industry is therefore changing. It is extremely important for potential participants in the competition that the ideas that they have and which are capable of moving the industry forward in a new round of evolution should be noticed and assessed by Intel and our colleagues and co-founders. The Skolkovo Foundation, whose purpose is to support innovations in Russia, and Intel Corporation, which has tremendous experience of international business, can provide participants with unique opportunities for growth and development. If their ideas are noticed and assessed at both the national and international levels, they will be really fruitful and will help to accelerate the evolution of industry in the right direction. And what could be more interesting and attractive for a research worker, an engineer or a programmer working in the field of information technologies?
“Let’s wish all the participants and organisers of the competition success, and we’ll be hoping for excellent results. Thank you.”