Gathering for the seventh time at the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, students demonstrated that their research can hold its own against mature academic work, and that knowledge of informatics is applied far more broadly today than one might expect.
On 6 May, Vilnius hosted the 7th Conference "Lithuanian Master's Students' Informatics and IT Research" at the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. The event is organised by the Institute of Data Science and Digital Technologies of the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Vilnius University (VU MIF DMSTI) and the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.
The conference brought together not only students from Lithuanian universities, but also those currently studying or having previously studied abroad.
Informatics and IT graduates are in demand
In his opening address, the President of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Academician Prof. Habil. Dr. Vytautas Nekrošius, noted that demand for informatics and IT specialists is rising not only in the technology sector, but also in medicine, the humanities, business, defence, public administration. "You are needed in every field today," the academician told the students gathered in the hall.
These were not merely words of encouragement – they reflect a reality illustrated by the breadth of presentations at the conference. This year, students presented research on an exceptionally wide range of topics, from artificial intelligence, natural language processing, medical image analysis, and life sciences research, to financial data modelling and the detection of malicious code in neural network models.
Student work – rigorous and useful
Academician Prof. Dr. Olga Kurasova of VU MIF DMSTI has observed a clear trend: the scale and intellectual maturity of the conference grows year on year. "Students' work has become genuinely very serious and can compete with established academic publications," she said.
Theoretical models alone are not enough for these students – they want to make a difference. Presentations spanning medicine, cybersecurity, finance, and other domains reflect a desire to apply knowledge where it is most needed and to address real-world problems.
Andrius Lukas Maslovas (VU Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, VU MIF) presented research entitled "Sensitivity to Parameters and Stability Analysis of a Reinforcement Learning Model: The PECS Cards Case", aimed at supporting children with autism spectrum disorders. Arnas Stučinskas (VU Faculty of Medicine) conducted a systematic review of more than one hundred thousand studies related to longevity, with the hope that his work ("Mapping Claims to Evidence in Aging Research: An Automated NLP Pipeline for Quality-Graded Literature Synthesis") will help people guard against the inflated, evidence-free promises sometimes made in public discourse by opinion formers and sellers of substances purportedly guaranteeing long life. Neringa Lukoševičiūtė (VU MIF) presented her study "The Effect of S&P 500 Inclusions on Share Prices", of particular relevance to investors.
These are just a few of the more than 30 studies presented by students representing six higher education institutions. The conference comprised two oral presentation sessions and two poster sessions. The conference proceedings volume runs to more than 300 pages.
Academician Prof. Dr. O. Kurasova stresses that students today can no longer afford to focus solely on their narrow field – they must also understand the context in which technologies will be applied: "A broad knowledge base is essential, as is genuine engagement with other, even highly niche, fields of science, where the need for information technology applications – and for IT professionals – is growing."
The invited keynote was delivered by VU MIF Professor Dr. Gražina Korvel, head of the large Lithuanian speech corpus LIEPA-3. Her work and the subject of her talk — "Lithuanian Language in Speech Technologies: The Present and Future Directions" – exemplify how informatics is today serving the preservation of the Lithuanian language in the digital age.
Awaiting a breakthrough
The head of the Cognitive Computing Group at VU MIF DMSTI, Academician Prof. Habil. Dr. Gintautas Dzemyda, expressed delight at the students and their work, expressed his hope of seeing them progress to doctoral studies, and cast his gaze further still – towards the breakthrough that Lithuanian science has yet to achieve.
The academician acknowledges that the conference reflects prevailing trends: a surge of interest in artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning neural networks, data mining, and machine learning. Yet this picture leaves him unsatisfied: "Most presentations are somewhat alike – there is data, there are methods, we apply them and obtain results. It is an excellent thing for developing competence, but I keep dreaming of a new breakthrough in Lithuanian science, including in the field of AI."
He remains convinced that such a breakthrough is inevitable: "It must happen. We are accumulating, accumulating that experience, at some point quantity will convert into quality." Academician G. Dzemyda notes that informatics as a discipline is broader than AI alone – software systems, optimisation, and modelling are fields that cannot be left behind. "AI solutions can help address those challenges, but at the same time, the pursuit of mathematical formulations, mathematical solutions, and mathematical models cannot be abandoned, these topics cannot be 'closed off'. Because then we all become formulaic, and the beauty hidden within those topics is maybe not discarded, I would say, but deferred – because developing them is unavoidable," he said.
The next stop – doctoral studies
For master's students, the conference is not only an opportunity to present their research publicly at the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, but also an experience that shapes a researcher's identity. In an academic setting, students can speak before an attentive yet demanding audience, face critical questions from peers and experienced scientists, and test their methods and insights.
Alongside the oral and poster presentations, participants learned about doctoral study opportunities at VU MIF in the fields of informatics and informatics engineering. These programmes and associated research activities were presented by Academician Prof. Dr. O. Kurasova (VU MIF DMSTI) and the Director of the VU MIF Institute of Computer Science (VU MIF II), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Linas Petkevičius.
The steadily growing number of participants and ever-broadening range of topics confirm that this conference has become an important tradition within Lithuania's academic community of informatics researchers and digital technology experts – a space encouraging young researchers to go further.