Isaac the Robot
- Isaac the Robot has been at HSE University since 2018.
Isaac the Robot has started working at HSE. He will automatically process publications by HSE staff. As you know, several HSE competitions rely on staff publication activity as one of their criteria. Now, Isaac can help us keep track of the number of points received in competitions assessing publication activity or first-level academic bonuses, online and in real-time.
The current scores are available here.
Isaac the Robot was named after the writer Isaac Asimov. He was a professor at Boston University and a popular science communicator. In his story Round Dance, he formulated the ‘three laws of robotics’, which dictate that a robot cannot harm a person. Importantly, Isaac will help predict the likelihood of participants’ success in staff competitions as well as cut costs incurred by the university.
If you are worried that Isaac has calculated the points for your publications incorrectly, try the following:
- Make sure that you ticked the ‘Yes’ field next to the question ‘Are you planning to use this publication to apply for academic bonuses?’ in the publication’s description in the database.
- Ensure that the status has been labelled as ‘Verified’ in the ‘Verification in the publication’s description in the database’. Please remember that publication verification may take up to 30 days after the publication is entered into the database and the field mentioned in point 1 is ticked.
- Check the number of points assigned to each publication according to the Publication Activity Assessment Regulations.
If you have any questions, please contact:
- Dmitry Dagaev, coordinator of Publication Activity Assessment (ddagaev@hse.ru), — general questions;
- Olga Churikova, Head of the Office of Academic Research (ochhurikova@hse.ru), — questions related to first-level academic bonuses;
- Ivan Oshchepkov, Head of the Publication Verification Unit (verification@hse.ru), — questions related to verification and categorizing specific publications;
- Ilya Gorelskiy, Expert of the Scientometrics Centre (igorelskiy@hse.ru), — questions related to bibliometrics.
Contact publications@hse.ru for assistance with entering and editing information on publications.
‘While HSE Sleeps, I Work’: Interview with Isaac the Robot
Early this summer, the HSE community was surprised to learn about its newest colleague: a robot helper named Isaac tasked with recording and scoring the publications by researchers and faculty. Isaac is constantly learning to improve its algorithms and interface, and now that it’s learned English, we are happy to share with The HSE Look readers the exclusive interview with Isaac taken by Okna Rosta, where he talks about his functions and even offers some words of advice.