Gabriella Leelee Enchill is a third-year student at the HSE University Doctoral School of Sociology. Her research focuses on gender inequality in rural Ghanaian communities. Gabriella spoke to the HSE News Service about what her studies have uncovered about inequality in the region, how women can gain agency by banding together, and why studying these communities helps empower women around the world.

Arina Kurbetyeva is a third-year student of the Bachelor’s in Digital Technologies and Telecommunications run by the HSE Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics (MIEM). During her second year, she spent one semester in China at CUHK-Shenzhen University as part of an academic mobility programme. The student shared her experience of studying in China with the HSE News Service.

HSE University and the InfoWatch Group of Companies marked the start of a new stage in their collaboration with the signing of a new agreement. The partnership aims to develop educational programmes and strengthen the practical training of specialists for the digital economy. The parties will cooperate in developing and reviewing curricula, and experts from InfoWatch will be involved in teaching and mentoring IT and information security specialists at HSE University.

Researchers at the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience have studied how the brain responds to audio deepfakes—realistic fake speech recordings created using AI. The study shows that people tend to trust the current opinion of an authoritative speaker even when new statements contradict the speaker’s previous position. This effect also occurs when the statement conflicts with the listener’s internal attitudes. The research has been published in the journal NeuroImage.

The key objectives of the partnership include joint projects in microelectronics and the involvement of company specialists in supervising the research activities of undergraduate and postgraduate students. Plans also focus on the preparation of joint academic publications, the organisation of industrial placements and student internships, and professional development programmes for the company’s specialists.

Researchers at the HSE Centre for Language and Brain have developed a tool for assessing text complexity in low-resource languages. The first version supports several of Russia’s minority languages, including Adyghe, Bashkir, Buryat, Tatar, Ossetian, and Udmurt. This is the first tool of its kind designed specifically for these languages, taking into account their unique morphological and lexical features.

In 2026, a new Bachelor’s programme in Development and Urban Planning will be launched at HSE University’s Faculty of Urban and Regional Development. The educational programme’s key partners are the MR development company and the A101 Group of Companies.

New interactive editions of Russian classics have been released in the Live Pages mobile app. They were prepared by students and graduates of the School of Philological Studies at the HSE Faculty of Humanities. The project, which has been developing for more than ten years in collaboration with experts from the School of Linguistics, offers readers not just text but digital books enriched with maps, timelines, and commentary for deeper immersion in the works.

Scientists at HSE University have found that current AI models, including ChatGPT and Claude, tend to overestimate the rationality of their human opponents—whether first-year undergraduate students or experienced scientists—in strategic thinking games, such as the Keynesian beauty contest. While these models attempt to predict human behaviour, they often end up playing 'too smart' and losing because they assume a higher level of logic in people than is actually present.