Third Global Software Engineering course opens for students of TUSUR and Ritsumeikan University

In October TUSUR students started their 15-week Global Software Engineering course carried out jointly with Ritsumeikan University (Japan).

In October TUSUR students started their 15-week Global Software Engineering course carried out jointly with Ritsumeikan University (Japan).

The course was organized by the TUSUR Division of International Cooperation within the framework of the current joint projects of TUSUR and the Japanese university. Lectures within the course are delivered by Professor of Ritsumeikan University Vitor Kryssanov. Technical support is provided by the TUSUR Laboratory of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

Global Software Engineering is an annual course that was first offered in 2012. Students of the Japanese and the Russian universities form groups and work together once a week, attending lectures and working on their joint projects. This year the course opened for a group of 4 students from Tomsk and 6 students from Kyoto. The two topics to be covered during this fall semester are “Biometrics” and “Humanoid Robots”.

The students are yet to decide what specific projects they will be developing within these topics – they can study fingerprint recognition, voice pattern recognition, etc. This year their developments will be based on two platforms: NAO and DARwin, whereas previous groups only used Aldebaran Robotics NAO.

The goal of the course is to allow students to have a taste of truly international work where people with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds must find the best ways to complete their tasks as a team.

“Global Software Engineering is actually not about engineering or technology. It is a course about teamworking methods. Student projects and robots are not our ultimate goal. What we first of all strive after as leaders is to understand how to organize the work of mixed student teams for their work to produce the desired result”, says the head of the TUSUR Laboratory of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Evgeny Shandarov.

Students who took the course in the previous years wrote 4 graduation theses and made conference presentations of a total of 15 papers based on their course research.