Intelligent Technologies and Data analysis in the Humanitarian Sphere

Profession

The humanitarian sphere has always been shaped and influenced by the development of society, adapting conceptual, methodological and theoretical foundations to emerging social phenomena. In recent years, with a sharp leap in the development of artificial intelligence and its spread in everyday use, "non-human intellectual agents" become part of society. As a result, the field of interaction between a human and an intellectual agent arises and it arouses the interest of linguistics and social sciences, since these interactions go beyond the boundaries of objective reality, creating its hybrid forms.
Philology plays a key role in the development of artificial intelligence, as it helps computers understand natural languages. Linguistic analysis allows computers to parse the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of sentences, making them capable of understanding and generating texts. Linguistics also contributes to solving the problem of ambiguity in language and defining the context of communication.
Linguistics has a wide range of applications in IT. One of them is the development of voice assistant systems that can understand and answer users' questions in natural languages. Thanks to linguistic analysis, these systems are able to process and interpret speech, as well as generate human understandable responses. In addition, linguistics is useful for machine translation, social media analysis, text processing and other natural language processing-related tasks. Understanding the basics of language allows AI to perform these tasks more accurately and efficiently.
In the near future, artificial intelligence will also encourage humanitarian professions to improve their key competencies and increase the efficiency of information and data processing activities, including decision support.
Due to the peculiarity of the humanitarian environment, it can be difficult for specialists with strictly technical competencies to interact with this environment. In order to organize effective work and get the required outcome, a new class of specialists with interdisciplinary competencies is needed, who are able to both understand the technical side of the problem and possess the necessary knowledge in the humanitarian environment, including the skill of effective interdisciplinary communication.

Educational Process

The goal of the educational program is to train comprehensively developed, highly qualified and competitive graduates with a wide range of knowledge, skills and abilities both in the humanitarian sphere and in the field of analysis and development of intelligent systems.
To achieve this goal, the educational process includes two tracks: the first one is aimed at obtaining fundamental knowledge in the humanitarian sphere, which is relevant for IT specialists; the second one is aimed at obtaining technical knowledge by humanities specialists in the field of artificial intelligence technologies.
The first track includes humanities-oriented disciplines such as:
• Digital Humanities;
• Foreign language in the field of professional communication;
• Semiotics;
• Linguistics;
• Cognitive Science;
• Corpus Linguistics;
• Computational Linguistics;
• Theory and practice of interpreting;
• Problems of modern philosophy;
• Psychology of the digital society.
The second track includes technical disciplines such as:
• Architecture of intelligent systems;
• Methodology of designing intelligent systems;
• Intelligent machine interpretation technologies;
• Information security of intelligent systems;
• Mathematical methods in humanities research;
• Data mining methods and algorithms;
• Machine learning methods;
• Pattern recognition methods;
• Modern technologies of natural language processing.
Mastering both tracks allows students to become specialists of a new class with interdisciplinary competencies, capable of understanding the technical sides of professional issues and possessing the necessary humanitarian knowledge to solve them.
This competence model distinguishes the program "Intelligent Technologies and data analysis in the humanitarian sphere" from similar educational programs, which makes it a unique program in the education market of the Russian Federation.
The practice-oriented disciplines were developed with the participation of key companies of the Russian IT market, represented by companies such as Yandex, MTS, Rostelecom, Russia Today and the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.

Practice

The program provides for several types of practices.
The practices are aimed at the formation and development of specific practical skills and allow students to fully apply their knowledge and skills.
The following practices are planned:
• Operational practice
• Technological (design and technological) practice
• Research work
• Pre-graduate practice
The base organizations for practice include Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Company “Kirillitsa”, Yandex, MTS, Rostelecom as well as RUDN departments such as Center for Development and Maintenance of Information Technology Solutions of the Russian Language Institute, Center for Digitalization of Pre-University Training of the Russian Language Institute, Center for Development of Digital Technologies in Educational Processes, Distance Learning Laboratory, and Russian and foreign partner universities.

Career

Due to the uniqueness of the educational program, graduates have the opportunity to get a job in leading Russian and foreign business structures, in IT companies carrying out projects in the field of artificial intelligence, in digital media companies and mass media, in government organizations and structures, in Russian and foreign educational and research organizations and in organizations carrying out expert activities on the positions such as:
• Head of the IT Department;
• Chief software architect;
• Lead software architect;
• Senior System Analyst;
• Senior research engineer;
• Automation engineer;
• Engineer for automated control systems;
• Head of the Informatization Department (service);
• and other senior and leading IT positions.
Graduates can also embark on postgraduate studies.