1 Prof. Meyer and the Office in Kazan

Figure 13.1 shows Prof. Bertrand Meyer teaching a class in a lecture room of the office in Kazan in the academic year 2014–2015.

Fig. 13.1
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Lecture by Bertrand Meyer in the initial operational center of Kazan

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Prof. Meyer was one of the first contributors of the project. He was regularly visiting our small offices and helping with curricula design, knowledge transfer, and class delivery. Bertrand is not only a good friend but a key player in the development of the university. He is still a visiting professor and comes often to Innopolis.

2 The Inauguration of Innopolis City

Figure 13.2 presents the rector of the university, Alexander Tormasov, during the inauguration of the city and the university building at the presence of the Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on June 9, 2015. That day was a big one with a large number of people coming from all over Russia. Personalities, media, and journalists: everyone wanted to be there! We were there.

Fig. 13.2
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Inauguration of the city

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3 The Trip of Students to Shenzhen

Figure 13.3 shows a delegation of our first cohort of bachelor students visiting Huawei in Shenzhen (China) in summer 2015, in a leisure moment. The students were directly invited by the company to their main site. Huawei kindly offered to cover the costs and provided technical education to the students for a period of 2 weeks. They come back to Kazan with excellent memories and nice book about Shenzhen.

Fig. 13.3
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A leisure moment in China

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4 The Faculty Retreat

In Fig. 13.4, bright memories of a faculty retreat in Italy are shown. The faculty (or part of it) self-organized a trip to the north-west of Italy (Liguria and Piemonte) in summer 2016. The idea was to mix work, reflection, and leisure. A similar concept was then repeated in 2017. When the numbers grew, the logistics become more complex, and the retreats were usually hold in Tatarstan.

Fig. 13.4
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Rest and work in Italy

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5 The First Graduation

During the same summer of 2016, at the end of August, Innopolis had the first graduation of master students, depicted in Fig. 13.5. Here Joseph Brown is dressing the gown of his alma mater, the University of Guelph, Canada. Using the gown (academic regalia) of the alma mater at student graduation is a common tradition in many countries beyond the UK these days. This practice dates back to Oxford and Cambridge. Dr. Brown brought it into our environment since early on.

Fig. 13.5
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Joseph Brown, the first master graduation in the university building, 2016. On the left, Ales Zivkovic; on the back, Rasheed Hussain

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6 The Lecture Theaters

Figure 13.6 shows one of the authors, Manuel Mazzara, in one of the large lecture theaters of Innopolis University. The excellent infrastructure of the university has been one of the important enablers for the growth of the entire city.

Fig. 13.6
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Manuel Mazzara in 2018—“Ⓒ 2018 Sasha Malikov, all rights reserved, printed with permission”

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7 A Success Story, Among Many

Some of our graduates followed the academic path, doing PhD studies all over the world, including places as Cambridge. Many landed in very good positions in top companies as software engineers, in Russia and abroad. Others became entrepreneurs. Among the several notable success stories of our graduates, one is standing out.

Kevin Khanda (in Fig. 13.7) was enrolled at the university in 2015 for his first year of bachelor studies and graduated in 2019. Since the early days of the program, he had the great ambition to create a competitive company, to do something new and big, and to work on some extraordinary project. And so he did, launching KazanExpress in 2017 and attracting investors. KazanExpress is a resident company of Innopolis city, and it is the first marketplace able to deliver orders in 1 day. Since 2018, the number of orders kept increasing to the point that, in 2021, AliExpress Russia became an investor.

Fig. 13.7
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Kevin Khanda and Giancarlo Succi at the graduation

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