On September 7-9 The Annual Conference of The Consortium of higher education Researchers / CHER 28th Annual Conference took place in Lisbon, Portugal. This year’s theme was ‘Global Challenges, National Initiatives, and Institutional Responses – The Transformation of Higher Education’. The participants discussed recent transformations in higher education: what global challenges the universities face and how to cope with these challenges.
Over the past two decades, the average life expectancy in Russia has increased by 2.3 years for women and 1.4 years for men, according to a recently published paper based on the WHO's Global Burden of Disease (GBD) assessment – a major epidemiological study by a group of international experts, including Vasily Vlassov, Professor of the HSE Department of Health Care Administration and Economy.
For the first time ever, a doctoral student of the Higher School of Economics took part in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, the world’s largest forum for young researchers in the fields of mathematics and computer science. Over the course of one week, the participants were able to meet and discuss their projects with laureates of awards such as the Fields Medal, Abel Prize, and Turing Award. Olga Tsukanova represented HSE at the Forum, bringing with her a project on mathematical modelling.
Academic Studies Press issued the ‘Word and Image in Russian History: Essays in Honor of Gary Marker’. The articles ‘Businesswomen in Eighteenth-Century Russian Provinicial Towns’ by Alexander Kamenskii and ‘Catherine’s Liberation of the Greeks: High-Minded Discourse and Everyday Realities’ by Elena Smilyanskayawere also included in the collection.
Takashi Takebe is a Research Fellow at the International Laboratory of Representation Theory and Mathematical Physics and Professor at the Faculty of Mathematics. He has been at HSE since 2009. He is a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Tokyo. He spoke to HSE News in English service about the unpredictability of life for international academics in Moscow, about teaching mathematics to Russians, the problems of language and cycling tours.
Parents of school students in Moscow tend to believe that test assignments in two major final exams—the Basic State Exam (BSE) and the Unified State Exam (USE)—are too complex and teachers fail to properly prepare students for the finals; this negative attitude, which appears to be a widely-held stereotype not necessarily supported by evidence, is formed long before the exams come round. However, according to a study by Alina Pishnyak and Natalia Khalina, once the exams are over, families no longer consider them so hard to pass.
The Summer School on Machine Learning in High Energy Physics, which was co-organised by the HSE Faculty of Computer Science and Russian internet company Yandex, has ended. Below, the Head of HSE's Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis, Andrey Ustyuzhanin, talks about the various ways in which physicists and programmers cooperate. He also discusses how researchers from HSE and Yandex have been participating in CERN experiments and how ordinary smartphone users can help unravel the secrets of the universe.
