Want to know what to expect this year, which project areas are in development, the challenges ahead, and why participating in festivals and events matters so much? You’ll find all that and more in the special video they recorded for DevStyleR.

A fierce and dynamic competition is on the horizon, so make sure to mark April 25 and 26, 2025, in your calendar. That’s when the milestone 10th edition of the FISSION 2025 scientific festival will take place. Young talents will compete in various categories, including biomedicine, ecology, computer science, mathematics, physics, and engineering. There’s even a special category reserved for younger students in grades five through seven.

The video is provided by the FISSION 2025 organizers from the American College of Sofia. 

Every year, the event brings together young people from different countries to present academic research projects. FISSION is organized by a select group of ACS students under the guidance of the school administration and Dr. Krasimira Chakurova, ACS physics teacher.

Participants are students from 5th to 12th grade, from different parts of Bulgaria and the world.

During the science fair, all students have the opportunity to submit projects in categories ranging from biomedical, biological and chemical sciences to ecology and environmental sciences, computer science, mathematics, physics and engineering.

Hotel accommodation is provided for all teams coming from outside of Sofia on the evening of April 12, and food and beverages are available for all participants and their supervisors during the event.

Each project is assessed by a panel of established scientists and experts. After the projects are carefully reviewed and evaluated, the jury awards students with “Best Project” Award or “Honorable Mention”Award in each category.

The event schedule includes campus tours, workshops and lectures for participants and their supervisors by guest speakers and scholars, and various networking opportunities.

The event is also open to visitors and guests on April 13, 2024.

Last year’s edition of FISSION was a huge success and was the first in-person edition since 2019. 104 students, together with their supervisors, presented a total of 55 projects, and many visitors had the opportunity to take a look at the projects and enjoy the event schedule.

This year, FISSION International Science Fair will once again welcome participants from all over the world and encourage them to inquire and inspire. The registration for the event continues to be open in February.

More information can be found on the FISSION website, as well as on Facebook and Instagram.

Read more:
1. Amazon Announces New Updates to Amazon Bedrock
2. GitHub Opens New Group for AI-Focused Open Source Projects
3. The CodeIT 2024 Team for the Competition and the Journey into the World of Programming

According to the company, the typical approach to creating a multimodal model involves training components for different formats of information separately and then combining them together. What sets Gemini apart is that it is trained for different formats from the start and then refined with additional multimodal data.

“This helps Gemini seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing multimodal models — and its capabilities are state of the art in nearly every domain,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, and Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind, wrote in a blog post.

Google also explained that the new model has quite sophisticated reasoning capabilities that allow it to understand complex written and visual information, making it “adept at discovering knowledge that can be difficult to discern among vast amounts of data.”

For example, he can read hundreds of thousands of documents and extract this information to lead to new discoveries in certain fields.

Its multimodal nature makes it particularly suited to understanding and answering questions in complex fields such as mathematics and physics.

Gemini 1.0 offers three distinct versions to cater to various size preferences: Ultra, Pro, and Nano, listed in descending order of size.

According to Google’s initial benchmarking of Gemini, the Ultra version has demonstrated superior performance, outperforming 30 out of the 32 widely used academic benchmarks in model development and research. Notably, Gemini Ultra has achieved a milestone by surpassing human expert performance in massive multitask language understanding (MMLU), encompassing 57 subjects such as math, physics, history, law, medicine, and ethics.

The integration of Gemini Pro into Bard marks a significant milestone, constituting the most substantial update to Bard since its initial launch. The Pixel 8 Pro now leverages Gemini Nano to enhance functionalities like Summarize in the Recorder app and Smart Reply in Google’s keyboard.

Over the coming months, Gemini is set to extend its presence to additional Google products, including Search, Ads, Chrome, and Duet AI.

Starting from December 13, developers can access Gemini Pro through the Gemini API available in Google AI Studio or Google Cloud Vortex AI.

Meet Savina Savova, the QA Manager at Anakatech, who believes that diversity at the workplace is the secret to completing each other and being good at what we do as professionals. Savina shares that she is happy to be working for a company that offers such a good work-life balance and she does her best to develop relationships with her teammates. As a QA Manager, Savina says that her work in Anaketech is very dynamic. The typical duties of a QA Manager, such as “establishing metrics for quality, increasing the quality of the products, managing releases and hot-fixes, prioritizing tasks, weekly reports, developing QAs, relocating, delegating, etc” are just a small part of her responsibilities. Savina is currently leading five teams and is responsible for the communication between them. According to Savina, her bachelor and master’s degree in the sphere of Physics, as well as her internship in CERN have taught her to develop an “out of the box” way of thinking and have also helped her gain huge technical knowledge, which suits one QA Engineer in the world of high technologies. What inspires her the most is her team. She shares that she has faced several challenges because of the fact that she is a woman, which in most cases happened due to the competitive work environment. She described her professional experience with one word and that is ‘perseverance”.

I’m happy to work for a company that gives me a good work-life balance. Together with my colleagues, we are doing our best to establish communication in the team, based on friendship

Favourite clothing? 

A sweatshirt.

High heels or flat shoes? 

Flat shoes – sneakers.

Which is the essential thing in your bag you never go out without? 

Lip balm.

Your favourite lipstick colour? 

Pink.

Which quality that is typical for women is foreign to you? 

Mysteriousness.

Which cause are you currently supporting? 

Sharo and Sharethemeal.

Have you ever faced any challenges in your career regarding the fact that you are a woman? 

Yes, I’ve experienced a few unpleasant moments. I think that they came out of envy and the competitive working environment.

Are you aware of how many women have the same job as yours? 

When talking about QA Managers, in Anakatech there is only one 🙂 To be honest, I don’t know anything about statistics outside the company I’m working with at the moment.

In your opinion, does the issue of gender inequality still exist in Bulgaria and around the world? 

I haven’t experienced such issues in years, knowing software companies in Bulgaria.

When I was accepted into the University of Physics, I was imagining myself working for NASA… Too ambitious.

What kind of policy does your company follow when it comes to encouraging diversity? 

We support diversity and differences between people as that’s the secret to completing each other so well and being so good in what we do! We work with people from different countries and cultures, and what’s important to us are their qualities that contribute to our success. I think everyone in Anaketech feels calm, accepted and free to express themselves.

How do your male colleagues treat you? Is their attitude towards you different? 

There is no difference in their approach towards me. We all respect each other, despite the hierarchy.

Do your feminine appearance and charm help you be more successful in a professional way? (for example, does it make communication easier?)

Yes, but the opposite happens too, don’t you think?

How do you balance your personal life from your professional one? Is there any rule that you follow? 

I’m happy to work for a company that gives me a good work-life balance. Together with my colleagues, we are doing our best to establish communication in the team, based on friendship, which helps a lot but can also be negative. I often don’t manage to establish the necessary boundaries.

Can you share something specific about yourself that we cannot learn from LinkedIn? 

When I was accepted into the University of Physics, I was imagining myself working for NASA… Too ambitious 🙂

Read More Inspiring Stories for Women in Tech in WRTech here.

Which sources do you follow and want to recommend to our audience? (podcasts, webpages, influencers, YouTubers, etc) 

Recently I’ve been following more standup comedians in order to relax 🙂 But I follow different leaders and motivators such as Mel Robbins, Simon Sinek, Ray Dalio, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk. I could also recommend an author – Kim Scott, who shared her leading experience in the book “Radical Candor”.

Which are the main duties of one QA Manager? 

My work at Anaketech is very diverse and dynamic, so the typical QA Manager duties are “establishing metrics for quality, increasing the quality of the product, managing releases and hotfixes, prioritizing tasks, weekly reports, developing QA-s, relocating, delegating, etc*. I manage five teams – Platform Admin, Player’s Application, Games, Automation and Marketing/Affiliates and they all have team leaders too. The communication and collaboration here are very good as we often share ideas with similar aims – to improve the internal processes and the way we work among the teams.

You are a Physics graduate. How does that integrate with your current working status? 

One of my bachelor’s degrees is in Theoretical Physics and the other is about teaching Physics and Mathematics, while my masters is “Physics of the nucleus and elementary particles’’. All these together with a summer internship at CERN (where the existence of the Higgs boson was proved) gave me a different way of thinking, and I gained technical skills that suit well the role of a QA Engineer in the “high technology world”.

What inspires you professionally? 

Maybe what inspires me now is my team.

Can you describe your professional experience in one sentence? 

I’ll even do it with one word – Perseverance.

If You Want to Read More Inspiring Stories for Success and Professional Growth Join the DevStyleR #Tech Influencers Community and Get Access to our Special Editions here.

Nikolet Jensen is a Frontend Web Developer at Accenture who decided to come back to Bulgaria by a coincidence. Nikolet shares with us that she doesn’t think that being a woman is a challenging thing. However, being a parent can sometimes be a career challenge, especially when the children are young. What inspired Nikolet to dive into the IT industry was the fact that she wanted to try something new and interesting and the IT covered many of the things that were important to her creativity, the flexibility of working hours, location, and also good pay. In Accenture everyone strives to have a balance of staff. They encourage the employment of women, who are still fewer, but significantly more than in the industry as a whole. In her opinion, there is knowledge with out which you cannot be a developer. However, the qualities that make a good developer vary. According to Nikolet, this is a profession in which you are constantly learning new things, so you need to be flexible and get used to getting out of our comfort zone. She advises everyone to always spare some time for physical exercises despite any personal and,professional obligations. Nikolet thinks it is very important to find time to move, for instance, a short walk outside or a workout at home.

“I wanted to try something new and interesting and it covered many of the things that were important to me.”

Nikolet Jensen, Frontend Web Developer at Accenture

Can you share something specific about you that we can’t find on LinkedIn?

I have two kids.

Have you encountered any challenges in your career in connection to being a woman?

I would not say that it is a challenge that I am a woman. Being a parent can sometimes be a career challenge, especially when children are young.

Do you know how many women work in your position?

I am aware that there are enough opportunities for many more women to join the IT field and I would like more of them to take this step.

Read More Inspiring Stories for Women in Tech in WRTech here.

Do you think that the problem of gender inequality is still relevant in Bulgaria and globally?

Yes, it is relevant, but it is also being discussed more than ever and steps are being taken towards alignment.

Which policies does your company encourage regarding gender diversity?

We strive to have a balance of staff, we encourage the employment of women, who are still fewer, but significantly more than in the industry as a whole.

Do your male colleagues treat you differently?

They don’t have a different attitude towards me.

Which sources do you follow and can you recommend some of them to our audience? (example: podcasts, pages, influencers, vloggers, etc.)

I would recommend Hacker News

https://news.ycombinator.com/

You have obtained your bachelor’s degree abroad. What made you go back to Bulgaria?

It was a coincidence – we came here for the summer when our daughter was little, and we never left. Your bachelor’s degree is in Journalism and Communications, and then you obtained a Master’s degree in American Science.

What inspired you to move to the IT sector?

I wanted to try something new and interesting and IT (in particular frontend development) covered many of the things that were important to me – creativity, flexibility of working hours and location, good pay.

Which are the most important qualities of a front and developer?

Тhere is a certain knowledge without which you cannot be a developer. But the qualities that make a good developer vary. I would rather say that it is a profession in which you are constantly learning new things, so we need to be flexible.

Favourite clothes?

Jeans.

High heels or flat shoes?

Sneakers.

Which typical female quality or household responsibility does not apply to you?

To sow flowers.

What is THE thing that you must have in your bag when going out?

Mobile phone.

Favourite lipstick colour?

Red, however, I don’t wear any and learn to get out of our comfort zone.

How and where should we put boundaries between the working day and the private life when everything happens in one place? Can you give some good practices and tips as an example?

When you have children, the boundaries are set by getting up early, leading and picking up from school, preparing food, etc. If I have to give specific advice, it is to have some time for physical exercises. I think it is very important to find time to move. For example, a short walk outside or a workout at home.

If You Want to Read More Inspiring Stories for Success and Professional Growth Join the DevStyleR #Tech Influencers Community and Get Access to our Special Editions here.

But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is one tech billionaire that’s not following suit. Instead, he unveiled his own futuristic ambitions recently: positioning his company as the center of the so-called metaverse.

The metaverse concept has been somewhat niche, presiding largely in the gaming world, until Zuckerberg pushed it into the limelight this week in an interview with The Verge.

He said Facebook would evolve from a social media company into a “metaverse company“. And Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth said Monday that the company is even building out a designated executive team to oversee progress towards the metaverse vision. It’ll exist within Facebook’s virtual reality branch.

Facebook’s VR and AR technology can currently “teleport you into a room with another person, regardless of physical distance, or to new virtual worlds and experiences,” Bosworth said in the Facebook post:

“But to achieve our full vision of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces — so you can remove the limitations of physics and move between them with the same ease as moving from one room in your home to the next.”

Zuckerberg said he’s banking on the transition to occur over the course of the next five years or so.

Computer science is a broad scientific topic. It includes the study of how data is processed, the security of networks, organizing databases, artificial intelligence, and the development of websites and applications.

Much like other forms of science, computer science takes an abstract approach to computers and computer programming. It explores how computers work in terms of algorithms and the computations that drive processes that manipulate data with theories.

Data scientists can use the knowledge they’ve gained to program and augment computer systems. After gaining knowledge of these theories, computer scientists use this knowledge for academic purposes (theoretical) or put the principles into practice (practical).

What is Software Engineering?

Software engineering is a marriage of programming and engineering. Officially, it’s the application of engineering principles to software design. In plain language, software engineering is a field in which hardware design and system computation come together. Let’s break down what software engineering really entails.

The physical parts of any computer are computer hardware. Hardware includes the monitor, the central processing unit (CPU), the hard drive, and so on. The hardware will eventually be the home for the software. Software is a collection of digital code that tells the computer hardware what to do. Examples of software include operating systems (like Windows or iOS), programs and apps, and drivers that run in the background.

Software engineers consider both the hardware and software aspects of a computer when creating software systems. This results in a product that functions more efficiently with fewer bugs and problems.

Computer Science vs Software Engineering

Software engineering is the application of engineering principles to computer hardware and software, usually to solve real-world problems. Computer science is the application of the scientific method to computer software. CS is broader and more abstract and is used for theoretical applications than practical ones.

Computer Science

The skills that computer scientists need revolve around abstract principles. Computer science degree program course work is rigorous with subjects like math, physics, and computational programming. Because most of the skills are theory-based, computer science can apply to a broad spectrum of job niches.

While computer science has a general theoretical focus, the two main niches for computer science are practical and theoretical. Practical computer scientists use computer science to solve real-world data problems, typically with data analysis or applied machine learning. Google is able to intuitively search for something because of the practical results of data science.

Software Engineering

For software engineering, the required skills are more practical. In an engineering field, there is a greater emphasis on applying knowledge about hardware for software development. You’ll need comprehension in subjects like math, mechanical physics, and basic engineering principles. The coursework is more focused on the design, analysis, and quality assurance of software to solve problems.

Software engineers need to learn how to utilize different types of programming languages like Java, JavaScript, SQL, C++, and Python. JavaScript is necessary for high-level, interactive web pages. Software engineers use SQL for managing data. Python and C++ are both general-purpose and can be used on any system. These languages are useful tools in a software engineer’s arsenal.

Problem-solving is an immensely vital skill for both fields. Whether you are programming or developing software, you need the ability to pinpoint issues and create a strategy to fix it. A lot of troubleshooting is involved for both, so attention to detail is equally essential.

Babbage asked Ada to translate an article from French to English about the analytical engine that was written by the Italian engineer Luigi Federico Menabrea for a Swiss journal. Not only did Ada translate, she added her own notes, which ended up being longer than the article. Her notes were published in 1843 in an English science journal.

Her notes, which detailed how people could use codes of letters, symbols, and numbers to instruct computers to complete complex calculations. Ada is often called the first computer programmer. In the early 1980s, the U.S. Department of Defense named a language after Ada, not surprisingly, called Ada.

Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper was a true pioneer. She learned math and physics at Vassar College. She then entered Yale University and received a master’s degree in mathematics. Hopper went on to teach at Vassar while simultaneously becoming one of the first women to earn her Ph.D. in mathematics. She joined the military as a lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserves during World War II. The Navy assigned her to the Bureau of Ordinance Computation Project at Harvard, where her assignment was to program the Mark I computer.

Hopper continued with the reserves after the war and worked as a research fellow at Harvard where she worked with the Mark II and Mark III computers. She helped coin the term “computer bug” after a moth shorted out the Mark II.

In 1949, Hopper went to work in the private sector. While working for Remington Rand, she supervised programming for the UNIVAC computer. Her team developed the first computer language compiler, which is essentially a translator from words to computer code. The compiler eventually led the way to the COBOL language.

Mary Jackson

Jackson was a mathematician and an aerospace engineer. She graduated with bachelor’s degrees in math and physical science from Hampton University (then Hampton College) in 1942. After graduation, she taught mathematics for a segregated black school in Maryland. She went on to largely clerical jobs until 1951, when she was recruited by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which in 1958 became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

She began her career at the space agency in the segregated West Area Computing Section at Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA, which was her hometown. It was there she earned the reputation as a “human computer.” In 1953, Jackson went to work with Kazimierz Czarnecki to conduct experiments with high-speed wind tunnels. Czarnecki encouraged Jackson to become an engineer, but since she was black, she had to receive special permission. At the time, schools were segregated. Jackson was part of the team that was featured in Hidden Figures.

Even after achieving the honor of being the first black female engineer at NASA, she was denied management-level promotions. In 1979, she decided to take a demotion and run the women’s program at NASA, where she focused on encouraging women in the sciences. While Jackson became less focused on computers as her career developed at NASA, it is fair to say that without her, there would be even fewer women in computer sciences today.