From October 15 to 26 the Associate Professor from Tomsk State University (TSU) Nadezhda Zilberman will host lectures on the module course "Social robotics" at the Higher institute of Information technologies and intelligent systems (ITIS) of KFU. TSU is the first Russian University in Russian Asia, one of three dozen national research universities and a participant of the Project 5-100 to improve the competitiveness of leading Russian universities among the world's leading research and educational centers.

Nadezhda Zilberman, a Candidate of Philological Sciences, an Associate Professor of the Humanities in Computer Science Department is known for her research in the field of social robotics. This year, Nadezhda became a finalist in the correspondence stage of the all-Russian competition for young university teachers and took part in the full-time round, which was held at the Lomonosov Moscow State University (МГУ). According to the results of all tests, the Associate Professor was announced as the best young university teacher in Russia in "Humanities, pedagogical disciplines, philosophy, art history, journalism, PR, advertising" section. Nadezhda is the author and teacher of the popular online course "My Friend is a Robot: Introduction to Social Robotics” on the well-known educational website Coursera, which won the 3^rd International competition of open online courses EdCrunch 2017. The online project cooperates with universities that publish and conduct courses in various fields. Students take courses, communicate with fellow students, take tests and exams directly on the Coursera website, and the official mobile app for iPhone and Android is also distributed. At the moment of February 2017, Coursera has 24 million registered users, more than 2000 courses and 160 specializations from 149 educational institutions.

The course will be held for second-year students of the master's degree program "Intelligent robotics" of the Higher institute of ITIS. During this course students will be introduced to a new interdisciplinary field – social robotics, which affects precisely socio-cultural aspects: the role of culture in forming ideas about a social robot; problems of choosing an external interface for a social robot; ethical aspects of social human-robot interaction.