Institute and labs are not only about spaces. It is necessary to create a structure where people can work with motivation and efficiency. We present here the structure and how it works.

1 The Importance of the Structure

An educational organization requires an effective structure in order to reach the planned objectives. Ultimately, the university structure is a management tool in the hand of the stakeholders that can simplify, or make more difficult, the daily operational activities. However, the university structure is also a way for the people themselves to reflect on their goals, and it is therefore an effective tool to build a system and orient the goals. With all this in mind, the overall structure of Innopolis University was built.

For what concerns the success of a university, people are certainly the most important part of the equation—in this case students, professors, and administrators—but excellent individuals poorly organized, structured, and managed will not be able to deliver optimal results being at the same time cost-effective. This is clear to every university management, and particularly important is to understand how to bootstrap the organizational structure since the early days.

The initial phase is important because the choices made during the startup will become legacy and will affect further moves. Once a specific structure, management style, and corporate culture have taken place, a revolution becomes difficult. It will be then necessary to modify, adjust, and correct in evolutionary terms, unless the stakeholders are ready for a major reset that involves costs, risks, and certainly losses. In general, new employees will adapt to the existing structure, culture, and mindset, with attached pros and cons.

2 The Initial Structure

In terms of research divisions, the initial building in the center of Kazan included only two of them: the Software Engineering lab and the Robotics lab. Institutes were not present at the time; the small number of employees did not justify this level of the hierarchy.

Only when the staff moved to the new campus, summer 2015, a structure with three institutes was formed: Software Engineering, Information Systems, and Robotics. Each institute included a few labs; only a handful of faculty members were present at that time. At the first Faculty Council held in Kazan, a handful of professors participated, not because of absences, but due to the tiny size of the faculty reflecting the small number of students.

3 Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering

The Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering is the first one created inside the university from the legacy of the work done in the initial office in Kazan. As a novel institution, there has been a large turnover of faculty members and researchers over the years. It would be out of the scope of this chapter to discuss this evolution or to take a snapshot of every single moment. We present in Fig. 7.1 a photo of the faculty workshop at the end of year 2017.

Fig. 7.1
figure 1

Faculty in December 2017

Full size image

3.1 Steps to Build a Faculty

As we mentioned, an organization is built around the people. A faculty is not an exception. If we observe the evolution, from the first group of people in Kazan to now, we can see that often the organizational structure was built around people. It was not people adapting to the organization, but the organization to evolve according to the need of people and their key values. Operationally, this process was performed bottom-up via series of meetings, workshops, and shared documents edited via collaborative tools like Google Docs and Overleaf.

3.2 The Four-Institute Structure

A structure with three institutes was kept until spring 2018, when the decision of aligning the number of MS programs with the number of institutes was taken, in particular with the arrival of the new provost, Sergey Masyagin, who replaced Tanya Stanko. Therefore, the Institute of Information Security and Cyberphysical Systems was created.

Since 2018, the organization in institutes of the university comprehends:

  • Institute of Software Development and Engineering (initial and current Director Manuel Mazzara)

  • Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (initial and current Director Adil Khan)

  • Institute of Robotics and Computer Vision (initial and current Director Alexandr Klimchik)

  • Institute of Information Security and Cyberphysical Systems (initial Director Alberto Sillitti and then Rasheed Hussain)

The four institutes are reporting to the Faculty of Computer Science and the dean’s office: Giancarlo Succi was appointed in 2016.

3.2.1 Institute of Software Development and Engineering

This unit is organized in three labs:

  • Lab of Operating Systems, Programming Languages, and Compilers—Head Eugene Zouev

  • Lab of Software and Service Engineering—Heads in time order: Bertrand Meyer, Manuel Mazzara, and Nikolay Shilov

  • Lab of Industrializing Software Production—Head Giancarlo Succi

3.2.2 Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

This unit is organized in four labs:

  • Lab of Data Analysis and Bioinformatics—Head Yaroslav Kholodov

  • Lab of Artificial Intelligence in Game Development—Head Joseph Alexander Brown

  • Lab of Data Analysis and Machine Learning in the Oil and Gas Industry—Head currently to be appointed

  • Lab of Machine Learning and Knowledge Representation—Head Adil Mehmood Khan

3.2.3 Institute of Information Security and Cyberphysical Systems

This unit is organized in two labs:

  • Lab of Cyberphysical Systems—Head Yaroslav Kholodov

  • Lab of Networks and Blockchain—Head Rasheed Hussein

3.2.4 Institute of Robotics and Computer Vision

This unit includes at the moment the Laboratory of Intelligent Robotics Systems, with head currently to be appointed.

3.3 Planning the Work of the Faculty

As the faculty was made of institutes and the institutes were made of labs, there was a key need to put all these elements together and for each faculty member to plan his/her own future, the one of his/her lab, and summing up all to institutes and faculty. For this reason, from 2018, new documents supplemented the overall mission document of the faculty: the manifestos of the institutes, which formed a key component not only in planning the achievements but in the real formulation of the faculty as a body of world-class researchers.

In parallel, again with the approach of having the documents growing bottom-up, specific teaching regulations were drafted, and a faculty handbook was produced. The handbook guides the life of faculty members, from appointment to promotion, up to retirement and awarding of emeritus status. Again, the content was not particularly different from the content of most of such documents worldwide, but having the individual professors sitting together and discussing literally word by word such content was a major propulsion in further enhancing the Innopolis spirit.

4 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

In a second moment, a Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences was created with Head Oksana Zhirosh. The faculty is composed of one institute, the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, which is composed of two labs: Humanities Laboratory and Social Science Laboratory. The idea of the institute is providing research and teaching in non-IT disciplines like pedagogy, sociology, English, and academic writing. Recently, such faculty has provided also support in areas that bridges the traditional disciplines of philosophy to computer science, such as logic, cognition, and artificial intelligence.