Skoltech’s strategy of applying the three strategic pillars of education, research and innovation to encourage the development of new businesses by its students is evident during this week’s Startup Village event at Skolkovo, where a trio of ventures backed by the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation are taking the spotlight.

One of the Skoltech start-ups exhibiting in the Village’s Startup Bazaar area is Tyler, an automated mosaic-producing robot named as a playful take on the word tiler. It’s the brainchild of five founding partners that include Dmitry Ermachenkov, an MSc engineering student in the Skoltech Space Center – who put his familiarity working in a robotics lab to a more artistic use with the project; and Andrey Sartison, a second-year Skoltech MSc student.

Using a broad palette of colored tiles, the system can produce a mosaic panel from any image. Tyler is composed of two wholly separate technologies that come together to create beautiful and functional mosaic patterns: a visual editor that first translates images into mosaics using custom-designed algorithms, and the custom-made industrial robot that precisely places and affixes the tiles in place. The system can create mosaics approximately 10 times faster than can a human, Ermachenkov explained.

Several commercial orders have already been completed, and the startup is now running a pilot project with the largest supplier in Moscow for Mr. Doors – a home interior store. Skoltech President Alexander Kuleshov also is considering using the technology to decorate four cafés at the institute’s large new campus, which currently is nearing completion. And moving beyond the basic square tiles utilized by Tyler today, the startup team is working on the ability to create freeform mosaics with mosaic chips of any shape.

Also presented at a Startup Village booth is SmartCom, a software and hardware complex designed to analyze the audience of outdoor advertising markets. Alexey Tikhankov, a Skoltech PhD candidate with a background in lasers and optics, applied his interest in the Internet of Things – what he describes as the connection between the real world and the internet world – in creating SmartCom to collect and analyze publicly available data about the users of mobile devices in an urban environment.

Such data includes routes of travel, time in transit, and most importantly, the advertising and information structures that fall within the field of view of the routes. SmartCom’s ultimate goal is targeted advertising when the audience moves in close proximity to an advertising structure.

The focus of Skoltech’s third Startup Village booth is the Skoltech eSports Academy, with members of the institute’s own team – named Monolith – present to speak about their passion for gaming. Ivan Khlebnikov, Skoltech’s Endowment Foundation director who is coordinating the eSports Academy’s launch at the institute, said eSports is more than just fun and games: “It provides the opportunity to explore such technologies as artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and the Internet of Things – while also boosting the gaming industry’s development.”