On February 27, the final competitions of the National Technology Olympiad (NTO) in the profile "Neurotechnologies and Cognitive Sciences" concluded at MSUPE, hosted at the L.S. Vygotsky Pedagogical Technopark "Quantorium." The traditional partners for the Olympiad profile in 2026 were the equipment developer BiTronics Lab and the digital marketing company Neurotrend.
36 finalists from 16 regions of the country and Kazakhstan competed for victory over the course of a week!
This year, as part of the final of the "Neurotechnologies and Cognitive Sciences" profile, participants developed a high-tech system that analyzes the electrical activity of the brain (EEG) and determines a person's focus of attention. The finalists formed teams to go through the full journey of neurophysiologist engineers: from assembling and adjusting sensitive medical equipment to creating neural network algorithms capable of extracting, in real time from the noise of brain signals, the specific object on which the operator is focused. Such technology lays the foundation for systems that can understand a person's state without words and control complex devices using mental commands. The work was carried out using modern equipment – an electroencephalograph and an electromyograph.
The winners in the individual competition were Oleg Drokanov from the Presidential Physics and Mathematics Lyceum No. 239 in St. Petersburg and Konstantin Bykov from Novosibirsk Lyceum No. 22 "Hope of Siberia."
The prize-winners of the profile also included:
- Students from "Hope of Siberia" – Gleb Egorenkov and Semyon Rodionov,
- Elizaveta Fedorova from Chelyabinsk Lyceum No. 35,
- Nika Smirnova from School No. 6 in Vsevolozhsk, Leningrad Region,
- Konstantin Yankov from Russian Gymnasium No. 59 in Ulan-Ude,
- Sofia Karabutina from the Yasnaya Polyana Complex named after L.N. Tolstoy in Novomoskovsk, Tula Region.
In addition, a participant from Kazakhstan – Semyon Kadasov, who arrived for the NTO final from Ust-Kamenogorsk – also received an award.
The winning team, consisting of O. Drokanov, K. Bykov, E. Fedorova, and N. Smirnova, handled the engineering task better than the others.
We congratulate all finalists of the "Neurotechnologies and Cognitive Sciences" profile of the senior track of the National Technology Olympiad on their new knowledge, experience, and friends, and the winners and prize-winners on the additional opportunities they earned in fair competition!