Research & Expertise

The 6th International Conference on Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts was held on July 27-29 in Moscow with the support of the Higher School of Economics. This year 130 papers from different universities, including many international ones, were submitted for the conference. The best works were selected by renowned experts in data analysis from all over the world; these papers will be included in the conference proceedings and published in the series ‘Lecture Notes in Computer Science’ issued by Springer.

ISSEK staff members Gulnara Abdrakhmanova, Leonid Gokhberg, and Alexander Sokolov have written a chapter – ‘Indicators of Information and Communication Technology’ – for a 10-volume set of the Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, edited by Mehdi Khosrow-Pour (Information Resources Management Association, USA). This publication came out in July 2017.

On July 10–13, 2017, Lisbon, Portugal welcomed the third meeting of national supervisory groups working as part of the TALIS 2018 secondary education evaluation project. Russia was represented by instructional design & practice experts Elena Chernobai and Daria Tuchkova from HSE Institute of Education.

Researchers from the HSE Centre for Cognition & Decision Making and the Control of Complex Systems Laboratory (Russian Academy of Sciences) have conducted a series of experiments to uncover what a person actually controls when they are tasked with independently affecting the activity of their own brain. This discovery may help develop non-pharmacological methods for treating epilepsy, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and depression.

In July 2017, the HSE Center for Historical Research has joined the European Information and Research Network on Parliament History. The Center for Historical Research is the only research organization from Russia among the network members.

A team of researchers from the HSE Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis (LAMBDA) has won a contest held by the Presidential Research Funding Programme. Researchers with the laboratory are developing a system of algorithms that will help physicists look for new particles in the Large Hadron Collider.

At the HSE Institute of Education, young scholars always strive to advance their competence and community integration by making out the best of the opportunities each summer’s learning & networking agenda affords. This year, IOE analysts Irina Shcheglova and Alexey Egorov took part in international summer schools for multidisciplinary social researchers held in St. Petersburg, Russia and Barcelona, Spain.

Austin L. Wright from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago flew to Moscow from Chicago to discuss  ‘Civilian Abuse and Wartime Informing’ at the Political Economics workshop that was held at HSE on July, 20, 2017.

HSE researchers examined the structure of online communities of Russian AIDS denialists – people who deny the reality of HIV and AIDS – and the manner in which they spread their ideas. The findings are published in American Behavioral Scientist.

It would seem that being surrounded by very capable classmates should boost a student's ambitions and competitive spirit and encourage hard work and high academic performance. However, according to Yulia Kuzmina, the reverse is also possible, when students feel inferior and less confident in comparison to more successful students. In her article Big-Frog-in-a-Small-Pond Effect: Is It Always Good for a Child to Study in a Strong Class? Kuzmina argues that a student's perception of their own academic success compared to other classmates can impact on their progress at school and plans to enrol in a university after school.