From a Mining Town in Armenia to a Future in AI—David Muradyan

_{A rejected transit app, a scholarship, and a glimpse of the future in Toulouse have shaped David Muradyan's unlikely path from Alaverdi to artificial intelligence.}

ALAVERDI, Armenia — When David Muradyan enrolled at the COAF Youredjian SMART Center in Armenia’s Lori Province, he was among its very first students. He signed up for a programming course. Today, he is a software engineer pursuing a master's degree in artificial intelligence at the French University in Armenia — and, by his own account, the distance between those two points was shorter than it might appear.

"SMART was a great help to me, especially during my first year at university," Mr. Muradyan said. "Thanks to COAF, I made many friends from different regions, became more confident, and, of course, received a scholarship."

The SMART model was conceived as a bridge between village and regional schools and the global economy, which is concentrated in Yerevan — a bet that talent in places like Alaverdi needed proximity to opportunity, not relocation.

Mr. Muradyan tested that proposition close to home. During his undergraduate studies, he approached the Alaverdi Municipality with an idea: an application that would let residents track public transportation in real time. He began building it himself.

"I worked on the project for about seven months and was ready to provide it free of charge," he said. "However, one month before I was supposed to hand over the project, they decided that I was not a reliable partner and chose to work with Yandex instead."

The disappointment in his voice is unmistakable. A student offering free civic software lost out to one of the region's largest technology companies. But Mr. Muradyan describes the episode less as a defeat than as an education — seven months of practical experience in designing, building and maintaining a real product for real users, the kind of experience no classroom assignment replicates.

He has carried that experience directly into his next project. As part of his scholarship program, Mr. Muradyan is developing software to help public schools organize final examinations. The program allows teachers to create tests digitally and see results immediately after an exam — a system designed to reduce both working hours and paper.

"In two months, I am planning to present the program to the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport," he said.

If the transit app was a lesson in institutional politics, an internship in Toulouse, France, was a lesson in where his profession is headed. There, Mr. Muradyan encountered the current frontier of artificial intelligence — including systems that unsettled him.

"What I saw there really 'scared' me," he said. "They are creating AI agents that can do the work of software engineers."

His response to that unease was not retreat but pursuit. He enrolled in a master's program in artificial intelligence, reasoning that the engineers most likely to thrive in the coming decade will be the ones who build such systems rather than compete with them.

"I think that if I become a software engineer who also has expertise in artificial intelligence and can create such agents," he said, "I will be able to do much more than I can now."

It is an ambition that would have sounded improbable a generation ago in Alaverdi, a city better known for its copper smelter than its software. That it now sounds routine — a local student, a local center, a pipeline to a graduate program in AI — is, in its quiet way, the point.

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