News

According to forecasts, 96% of all payments and money transfers in Russia will be performed with the help of innovative services by 2035. The financial technology industry is trying to simplify interactions with money as much as possible. In this article, IQ.HSE draws on a report by the Centre of Development Institute to explain current developments in the fintech industry.

For ten years now, HSE has been holding an annual grant competition for researchers who wish to start new international laboratories at HSE in collaboration with leading foreign scholars and scientists. The most recent competition reached its conclusion this past November, and now some of the selected proposed labs have already begun operation. Who are the competition winners and what kind of research will they be doing?

LHCb (Large Hadron Collider beauty) collaboration, one of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) experiments, reported that their detector has identified particles that have not previously been detected in physics experimentally – excited omega baryons (Ω-b). Just several years ago, detecting such particles in LHC was believed to be next to impossible. Among proton particles, the excited ‘charmed omegas’ were preselected by an algorithm created by staff from the HSE Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis  and Yandex LLC. IQ.HSE talked to Denis Derkach and Fedor Ratnikov about their collaboration’s ‘fresh catch’ and about the point of ‘fishing’ on LHCb in general.

On January 30, Dr. Arnis Sauka, Head of the Centre for Sustainable Business at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (Latvia), presented the findings of a Shadow Economy Index study at a research seminar at the HSE School of Sociology and Centre for Labour Market Studies. In an interview for HSE News Service, Dr. Sauka discussed the idea behind the study, its methodology, and results.

Moscow, like any modern big city, attracts migrants from different regions and countries. Some of them speak very little or no Russian. Their adaptation and successful integration depend in part on how fast they can learn Russian and in part on whether the city makes an effort to accommodate other languages. According to linguist Mira Bergelson, this latter factor is particularly important if the city is to benefit from immigration.

On January 29 HSE experts participated in a seminar on ‘Skills and Returns on Education in the Russian Federation’ at the World Bank office in Moscow. The seminar was held as part of the analytical support programme for Russia’s national priority project ‘Education’.

Unlike the case in many developed countries, the Russian government is ready to provide financial support to all people who are registered unemployed. Researchers from the HSE Centre for Labour Market Studies undertook a study of how the unemployed are treated in other countries and proposed measures for improving the situation on Russia’s labour market.

Children from families with high professional and educational status are twice as likely to enter a prestigious university as their peers from low-resource families, HSE University researchers have found. The ‘privileged’ adolescents benefit from strong family attitudes towards a good education, parental investment in their studies and the high academic performance associated with it. At the same time, even when they have good grades, students from poorly educated families do not even try to get into prestigious universities.

Is a political scientist a true scientist and should political scientists be categorised as either theoreticians or practitioners? Why is Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’ a ‘must read’ and is there any point in communicating with someone who has stopped learning? Can a modern university fence itself off from the world around it, and what does critical thinking have to do with it? These are some of the subjects we touch on in our conversation with Alexei Chesnakov, School of Politics and Governance professor with the Faculty of Social Sciences.

The year 2019 ended with an important event: Russia approved its first national standards for artificial intelligence. Starting in September 2020, AI-based smart systems will need to comply with these new regulations. It is far more difficult, however, to regulate people's attitudes towards such systems. People tend to fear and idolise AI, but should they really? Henry Penikas, Assistant Professor of the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences, discusses why they probably shouldn't and how algorithms can be fooled.