Press releases

MINSK, 17 May (BelTA) – Alexander Bazhanov, a fifth-year student of the Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science of Belarusian State University, won IBM’s the Great Minds Challenge (TGMC), BelTA learned from the press service of Belarusian State University.

The TGMC initiative provides the winners with an opportunity to partake in research projects alongside foreign scientists, understand actual IT problems, and explore IBM’s cutting-edge technologies.

Alexander Bazhanov became the first Belarusian to join IBM’s international research group over the nine-year history of the competition. The participants had to write about their personal vision of scientific development in a particular field and the ways to apply and further develop IT in this field. These answers were the key factor that determined the jury’s choice.

In August 2017 Alexander Bazhanov will join 20 scientists working in IBM’s research laboratory in Nairobi, Kenya. Here he will work on the project “Blockchain powered biometric identification (Kenya)”.

The laboratory is busy developing an identity system for Kenya and a platform to make more complicated applications to protect electronic medical records that can be provided by customers when necessary.

The TGMC is a competition for internships of 3 to 6 months at one of the IBM Research Labs in Zurich, Dublin, Nairobi, or Johannesburg for students from central and eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This is the ninth edition of the Great Minds Competition. Over nine years only 70 students have won internships in IBM’s research centers.