An online meeting took place on 17 September.

In his greeting, Rector of Kazan University Ilshat Gafurov noted the huge potential that the two universities have with regards to cooperation. In particular, the points of mutual interest are new materials, biomedicine, medical cybernetics, AI, communications, applied mathematics, and pharmaceutics. In education, there are plans to create new programs, including those in collaboration within the Erasmus+ framework with the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, North Macedonia, Norway, Turkey, and Israel. Both sides are also eager to develop projects tailored to children with autism spectrum disorders.

“It's especially pertinent for us because we are going to open a kindergarten for kids with autism spectrum disorders this year,” shared Dr. Gafurov.

President of HIT Eduard Yakubov emphasized that the memorandum should act as a first stage in developing full-scale academic cooperation.

“We are very glad to begin cooperating with Kazan University. Both universities pay much attention to important issues, including education for children with special needs. I think that involving international IT companies should be effective in this case, as they can provide support for such a project,” he said.

He also congratulated KFU on the recent success in the grant contest for world-level research centers, where our university will be in charge of the Liquid Hydrocarbons Center, “It's a huge accomplishment! I am sure that we can soon expand the scope of our projects. Just recently, Israel, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed a peace and friendship agreement, which leads us to the idea of cooperating with universities of these oil-rich countries,” concluded President Yakubov.

For Kazan University, this was the first ever experience of signing an agreement online.

As soon as 23 September, HIT Professor Nava Shaked will join a webinar on speech recognition software; KFU will be represented by Director of the Center for Digital Transformation Dmitry Chikrin and Chair of the Department of Applied Linguistics Yelena Gorobets. The next webinar will be dedicated to digital medicine and will feature KFU Professor, Director of the Center for Precision and Regenerative Medicine Albert Rizvanov.

UPD 21 Sep 2020: The text has been amended to reflect the correct title of Dr. Eduard Yakubov (President of HIT) and the list of countries which are the parties of the trilateral agreement (Israel, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain).

Source text: Leisan Zakirova

Photos: Nikita Tokhtasinov

Translation: Yury Nurmeev