What do interns at ABBYY actually do

ABBYY pays great attention to the training of qualified IT-specialists and the development of their abilities. We believe that already from the first courses of the institute it is very important to involve children in solving real problems in the fields of OCR, machine learning, NLP and to participate in existing projects, because theory is not possible without practice. Therefore, we invite talented students from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Moscow State University, the Higher School of Economics and other universities to attend our internships. This may be a practice not only for the summer, but for a longer time. In any case, a student at ABBYY has a good opportunity to prove himself, to participate in the work on real products, to gain new knowledge, useful skills and join our team. Guys can always negotiate with their mentors and combine practice with study. In this post we will tell

Misha Egorov, intern in the Image Analysis Group

- Tell us a little about yourself and how you found out about the internship?
- I am 20 years old, studying at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, at the Faculty of Innovation and High Technologies, at the basic ABBYY department. Finished the third course. Our department curator Ella Trofimova invited me to undergo several interviews in order to come for an internship in image processing. I solved problems on them, there were questions on logic and knowledge of algorithms. After two interviews, I was called to the image analysis department to deal with the task of finding text on images. This is my first internship at an IT company. We agreed that it will last 6 months.

- How is your day at ABBYY?
- Now I work full time, and from September I will study and less time to work. We have already discussed it. In the new semester, I will go for three days to classes at the ABBYY department, which is located right at the company's office, and for two days for couples to the faculty in Dolgoprudny.

- What do you do?
- I am searching for text on images. Our goal is to increase the quality of the product without losing the speed of its work. ABBYY uses neural networks for this. My research task is to search for text detection articles, as well as to test the quality and speed of neural network models, which are described in the article. In addition to this global task, there are even smaller ones: for example, port the neural network model to mobile devices.

- Which of these tasks has become completely new for you?
- Before that, I did not often come across neural networks. Of the frameworks for learning the network, I used only one, and therefore, at first, I spent a lot of time studying new libraries. Still faced with a huge variety of data formats that are used in training models. Therefore, sometimes you have to write your own scripts to convert or search for ready-made ones.

- What do you like about the internship?
- I like that the internship is closely related to my studies at the institute. I study at the MIPT at the basic ABBYY department and do internships at the same company, so I have the opportunity to write a bachelor thesis on the topic I am currently studying.

- Tell me about your mentor: what is his role in your internship?
- This is Kostya Gudkov, the developer of the Image Analysis Group. If I am engaged in testing and searching for alternative models, then Kostya is engaged in improving his own model for searching text on images. We communicate every day. He advises me what articles to read, what to look for. If I have any questions, I turn to him, and he helps.

- Would you like to stay here to work?
- Yes, because I can work here in my specialty, which is related to my studies at the institute.

- What do you like to do in your free time?
- I like evening jogging in the fresh air to the music. Watching machine learning courses.

Polina Komissarova, trainee language development group trainee

- Tell me about yourself and how did you find out about the internship?
- I am 20 years old, I study at the Moscow State University at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, I finished the 3rd course. I learned about ABBYY back in school when company representatives came to us for summer practice and talked about their work. This year I was looking for a summer internship and remembered ABBYY, I went to the site to see what opportunities there were, I wrote to the manager of educational projects Ella Trofimova and I was invited for an interview. There I solved three problems in mathematics, programming and linguistics, then we discussed them. After that, there was another interview with the head of the department, and as a result I was called for an internship.
In the first two weeks of my internship, I read books, watched courses, and talked with my mentor, the head of the Language Development Group with a complex script, Yura Vatlin. Then I started reading the code that is already in the company, I already understood more and did more myself.

- What do you do?
- I was given several task projects. The first project I was involved in was the recognition of hieroglyphs. In Chinese and Japanese, there are hieroglyphs that change their meaning depending on the size. In ABBYY there are neural networks that can recognize hieroglyphs. I needed to modify one such neural network so that it could recognize the hieroglyphs in the pictures without prior scaling, that is, not reducible to a certain size.

In the second project, we solved the problem of recognizing styles of hieroglyphs. In Chinese and Japanese, there is a set of fonts, and with the help of machine learning methods, one had to learn to recognize which style the style of a hieroglyph belongs to.

Now I am engaged in the third project. Its essence is as follows. We have sentences made from hieroglyphs. We need to recognize the text entirely and find the position of the beginnings and ends of individual hieroglyphs. This will help to overcome problems with editing scanned documents in cases where the hieroglyphs may overlap a bit.

- Do you know Chinese?
- In high school I studied Chinese, was fond of this country and went to China twice. But then I had to choose: math or foreign languages. In high school I decided to study in depth mathematics, physics and programming, so the Chinese faded into the background. Well, now there is such an amazing opportunity to combine these areas.

- What in the internship has become completely new for you?
- Absolutely everything, because I came as a person who can program in C and C ++, and as a result I program in Python, about which I had not known anything before. At the institute I studied a little computer vision techniques, but not in neural networks, but simply algorithmic methods of ordinary programming. And now I use completely new techniques for me, and I had to study them from scratch. But it was extremely interesting, a new world opened up for me, and immediately there was an opportunity to apply new knowledge in practice, to see how products based on these technologies work, how people and companies use them.

- What was the most difficult?
- At first it seemed to me that it would be difficult to combine the internship with study. But if you clearly divide time for work and time for study, you do not feel any tension. And the road to work takes a lot of time, and at first it bothered me a little. But then I realized that at that time I could work remotely, read books and watch courses. In addition, the office has a huge number of areas for work and leisure in an informal setting: a terrace with seating and Wi-Fi, hammocks, table tennis and much more.

- Tell me about your mentor: what is his role in your internship?
- Yura Vatlin helped me a lot, explained, since for me this is the first serious work in the industry. What I am most grateful to him for is that he taught me to look for information on my own. He is also interested in calligraphy and various Eastern cultures, languages, that is, he approaches his work not only from the point of view of programming, but also from the point of view of the area in which he uses programming. I like this, more holistic approach to the tasks. And when you talk to him, you want to grow professionally.

- Would you like to stay here to work?
- I would very much like to stay here to work, because the company senses some kind of common spirit, and this is not related to corporate events or events. All in ABBYY are united by the desire to do a common thing: to develop the company's products and make them even better. Employees really like what they do. And me too. I'm not sure that I will be able to stay here to work at the moment, but after studying I would be happy to consider this opportunity.

- What do you like about?
- Recently, I became interested in yacht sports in the section of Moscow State University. For me, this is a drive, and speed, and a bit of fear, when your boat turns over and then you go all bruised. It seems to be unpleasant, but when you go ashore, you understand: it was cool.

Azat Kalmykov, intern in the Mobile Application Development Group

- Tell us a little about yourself and how you found out about the internship?
- I am 19 years old, I study at the HSE at the Faculty of Computer Science in the program "Applied Mathematics and Computer Science." Moved to the second course. The curator of my group at the institute, Sonya Oronova, works at ABBYY as a junior project manager. She spoke about the internship, and I decided to apply for an intern position in Android development. I completed the test task: I had to make a small application that in the right format displays questions from StackOverflow. Then I had an interview, and they took me.

- What are you doing at ABBYY?
- I am engaged in porting ABBYY technologies to the platform for the Internet of Things Android Things. And under it, I write an experimental application that will process images from the industrial board camera (similar to the Raspberry Pi), read text that has entered the frame and translate it into user-friendly format using ABBYY technologies. Ideally, such a complex should work on the production line and control the conveyor if a certain text or bar code is encountered.

- How is your day going?
- I come to the office after 11. I do work and at the same time I listen to my favorite music. In the middle of the day I take a short break, rest, play table football. Internship goes in the summer. In the fall I will start to study, and I definitely won’t be able to work full time, but maybe I’ll be able to combine.

- What has become completely new for you here?
- I have not worked in an IT company before, so everything is new. A lot of amenities. There is a free schedule. I can come in any clothes, so now I sit in sports shorts and sandals, and it is comfortable.

- What is the most interesting thing about this internship?
- Before that, I was engaged in my small projects, but I did not find any real use for them. For example, he developed a bot that automatically fills the telegram channel with content. Here I work on technologies that are used in real projects, they can be sold to someone. For example, you can transfer our pilot project to an industrial drone, and using ABBYY technologies, it will be able to more accurately navigate around the city or save recognized data from house numbers or signboards to the database. What I do is, in fact, part of the IoT industry. This is a promising and interesting area that I like.

- What was not very easy for you?
- For example, it was necessary to read English documentation a lot. Not to say that this is something new for me, but the amount of information was very large and it was not easy to understand.

- Tell me about your mentor!
- This is the head of the group of applications for mobile platforms Igor Akimov. He oversees my work, tells me where to go next, what tools to use, answers my questions, even technical ones, which is nice.

- Would you like to stay here to work?
- I understand that the work that I am doing now will clearly be different from what I will be doing if I work at ABBYY. It will be necessary to learn more about what current tasks the company has and whether I can effectively combine work with study and not lose interest.

- What do you do in your free time?
- I play the guitar, ride the bike. I like to read books and journalism.

Sasha Mamontov, intern in the Mobile Application Development Group

- Tell us a little about yourself and how you found out about the internship?
- I am 19 years old, I study at the HSE on the bachelor program "Software Engineering", I finished the 2nd course. I learned about the internship from a classmate who is already working in the mobile division of ABBYY. I sent my resume, I decided the test task, I came for an interview. There I was given the task of understanding the tools for developing the Android platform and the Kotlin programming language. My internship will last until the end of August.

- What are you doing at ABBYY?
- This is my first internship in an IT company. I come to work at about 11. At the beginning, the head of the group of applications for mobile platforms, Igor Akimov, offered to look at new developments with Google I / O and think about how they can be applied in the company's products. I made a prototype, showed the team, and we came to the conclusion that Slices and Actions have useful scenarios for implementation, but a serious refinement of the application will be needed. Then I studied the code of the mobile application ABBYY TextGrabber, in which I am trying to improve the recognition results or user experience. For example, I saw in the code that the recognized words have exact positions on the image that we practically do not use. I showed it to Igor, he said cool let's try to display the text and its translation directly on the image in the right places. Now the application can more accurately understand where it is,

- What has become completely new for you?
- Before that, I did not participate in large projects. The TextGrabber code has a lot of dependencies, and it's not easy to understand them. At the institute, we had a course on Android, classes were held every two weeks during the semester. Everything is much more serious here, and there is help from more experienced colleagues.

- What is the most difficult thing about this internship?
- In simple projects, which did before that, everything was unambiguous. In large applications it is now difficult to understand where the dependencies from one class to another lead.

- What did you like about ABBYY?
- In ABBYY pleasant team. If something is not clear, I always approach the guys, ask them, they will show and tell everything. And I also liked to feel in the development of a large project. I was interested to try to do something with my own hands. Before that, I only wrote coursework.

- Tell me about your mentor!
- This is the head of the group of applications for mobile platforms
Igor Akimov. He comes up and asks what and how. Checks how the job turns out. He brings with the right colleagues, for example, a designer or analyst. Gives more advanced tasks if the previous step was successful.

- Would you like to stay working at ABBYY?
- Yes, if the schedule at the institute settles.

- What do you do in your free time?
- I play computer games, I like football, I watch TV shows. For example, now I am reviewing Doctor Who.

Want an internship at ABBYY? Ask any questions and email us here and here . And all the vacancies in ABBYY can be viewed on this page .

Elizaveta Titarenko, editor of corporate blog ABBYY, spoke with interns