News

On October 11-12, the HSE St. Petersburg campus hosted the first ever international Kochubey Readings, devoted to the study of private collections in Russia and around the world. The conference took place under the patronage of the Kochubey family, members of which travelled to Russia from France, Belgium, and the U.S.

Researchers from the Higher School of Economics and the Turner Scientific and Research Institute for Children’s Orthopedics have discovered that in children with arthrogryposis, the power of electrical activity in the brain cortex decreases, while its dynamics remains the same as in healthy children. The results of the study were published in the paper ‘Characteristics of electrophysiological activity of the cerebral cortex in children with arthrogryposis’.

The Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge has prepared some quantitative and qualitative data about the work of professionals who are essential for the knowledge economy.

London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and HSE University – St Petersburg launch the Paulsen Programme, funded by the Dr Frederik Paulsen Foundation, in order to support historians in Russia who have been working on the period from the mid 17th century to 1918.

This was the conclusion made by researchers from the HSE Centre of Sociology of Higher Education who analysed responses to rating scale questions made by more than 22,000 respondents. Their results showed that the first option from the list of alternatives is chosen most often.

This September, Steve Kowalewski, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Georgia (USA), gave a series of four lectures and seminars at HSE: ‘Motecuhzoma, Aristotle, and Keynes,’ ‘Advances in City-State Research, with an Example from Mesoamerica,’ ‘Ways of Teaching Anthropology,’ and ‘The Anthropologist as a Hero of Our Time’. They were designed to appeal to a wide range of faculty and students associated with the HSE International Centre of Anthropology, which studies social institutions, forms of political organization and cultures of peoples of the past and present in historical dynamics, in the context of local and global sociocultural history.

The HSE Faculty of Computer Science has launched the International Laboratory of Stochastic Algorithms and High-Dimensional Inference (HDI Lab). The Lab’s Academic Supervisor,Eric Moulines, and Chief Research Fellow, Vladimir Spokoiny, spoke to us about the fundamental and applied aspects of research performed by the laboratory, their relations with machine learning, and Russian-French academic ties.

The Higher School of Economics will become one of the government’s leading centres of expertise in the field of agricultural and ecological development, agrarian biotechnologies, rural areas, and the agroecological system as a whole. Additionally, the university will advise the government on methods for boosting agricultural exports and carrying out state regulatory reforms in waste management. This agreement was reached during a meeting between Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Gordeyev and the HSE researchers.

Due to differences in cultural traditions and social standards, people from various countries pursue different behaviour strategies in difficult situations. For example, some become introverted, while others seek other people’s help. Elena Chebotareva, a psychologist from HSE, compared the coping strategies used by French and Russian students, as well as their impact on psychological well-being.

On October 2, the HSE International Scientific-Educational Laboratory for Socio-Cultural Research held a regular seminar from its Culture Matters series entitled ‘The scents of Christmas past – the relationship between memory and olfaction.’