About the Festival
GEEK PICNIC is a large-scale popular science festival that brings technology and creative innovation to the general public. Every year lovers of science, arts and other unusual forms of self-expression gather at the event.
This year HSE University became an official partner of the festival. Professors and instructors of the university will give talks in Russia’s two capitals: on July 6-7 in St. Petersburg and on July 13-14 in Moscow.
This year’s theme: IMMORTALITY
The festival programme includes a lecture hall with speakers in the field of innovation and technology, lectures on the prospects of the future and the possibility of immortality, cosplay zones, VR, robots and much more!
HSE University is now the general content partner of the Habitat track.
The track, prepared jointly with the University, will include lectures on ecology, energy, urbanism, city anthropology and utopian cities, sound violence, taxidermy mythology as a reflection of social problems, and the evolutionary significance of old age and death. Plus, a lot more that is breathtaking and disturbing.
HSE at the Picnic in St. Petersburg (July 6 and 7)
Stay tuned for more information
Habitat
Guests will be able to learn what cognitive urban planning is and how a city’s sound environment leads us to certain behavioral patterns.
Artificial intelligence
An expert on banking technology will talk about machine learning algorithms (FastText, BERT, ELMo) and compare their effectiveness in completing simple, but unusual tasks.
For Parents
In the ‘For Parents’ zone, a lecturer from HSE University will tell interested parties about parenthood and passion.
HSE at the Picnic in Moscow (July 13 and 14)
Stay tuned for more information
Habitat
Environment, ecology, industry, infrastructure, urban planning and smart cities are what directly affect our lives in terms of its quality, duration. In the Habitat track you will be able to attend lectures by instructors and professors of HSE’s Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism, the Faculty of Urban and Regional Development, and the master’s programme ‘Prototyping Future Cities’. Representatives of HSE’s Shukhov Lab will also give presentations. In addition, students of the ‘Prototyping Future Cities’ programme will give talks in the Habitat track’s Expo area.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The head of a Sberbank research group, AI Laboratory, will discuss the limitations of deep neural networks and possible ways to resolve them.
For Parents
This track is for parents present and future. Scientific research in the field of pedagogy, conscious parenthood, approaches to education—these are just a handful of the topics that representatives of the HSE master's program ‘Systemic Family Therapy’, Anna Varga and Grazina Budinaite (Moscow), will address.
GAMEDEV
You can attend the lecture ‘What Kind of Work is There in the Gaming Industry and How Do I Get There?’ by Vyacheslav Utochkin, director of educational programmes on the gaming industry at the HSE Higher School of Business-Informatics.
Outer Space
In the Expo area of the Outer Space track you can see ‘space’ exhibits from HSE’s Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics. The exhibits represent a whole complex of simulators of the space environment, designed to teach students of all ages the basics of developing, designing, assembling, testing and operating a spacecraft!
Tickets
HSE students and employees can get tickets at 20% off before June 30. Use the promotional code: HSE