Research & Expertise news at HSE University

On June 24-25, HSE University held the international academic conference, ‘The 1990s: A Social History of Russia’ organized by International Center for the History and Sociology of World World War II and its Consequences, the Boris Yeltsin Center, the Egor Gaider Foundation, and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. HSE News Service spoke with Roberto Rabbia, one of the international participants, about how he became interested in Soviet history, why he reads Soviet newspapers, and what he has learned from his research.

Andrey Savchenko, Professor at HSE University, has developed a method that can help to enhance image identification on videos. In his project, a network was taught by a new algorithm and can now make decisions on image recognition and classification 10 times faster than before.

It is believed that carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere are mainly regulated by ‘direct’ economic instruments - the carbon tax and the Emissions Trading System (ETS). However, a comparative analysis has shown that ‘indirect’ instruments, such as excise taxes on motor fuel and other energy taxes, did not yield any lesser impact than their ‘direct’ counterparts, and, over time, were even more effective. This is the conclusion drawn by HSE researcher Ilya Stepanov in his article, ‘Taxes in the Energy Sector and Their Role in Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions’.

Radomir ‘Ray’ Mitic just completed his PhD at New York University and will be joining the Council of Graduate Schools as a postdoctoral fellow this coming fall in Washington, D.C. This summer, he received an HSE SemyonovAward Research Internship to research civic engagement among Russian university students at the Institute of Education at HSE University. Last week, he participated in the International Summer School of Higher Education at HSE – St. Petersburg, and now he is conducting field research in Moscow. HSE News Service spoke with Ray about his research, his impressions of the two Russian cities, and his future plans.

University-age students in large cities show little concern for their health and do little to care for themselves. This is the finding of a survey conducted in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and Perm.

A team of researchers from Germany and Russia have demonstrated that long contraction of muscles in one hand increases involuntary reaction of the other one. Meanwhile, the time between muscle contractions in both hands decreases. The results of the study have been published in the paper ‘Inverse relationshipbetween amplitude and latency of physiological mirror activity during repetitive isometric contractions’ in Neuroscience.

On June 3-4, a conference entitled ‘Beyond Post-Truth: Media Landscapes in the “Age of Insecurity”’ was held in St. Petersburg. The conference was jointly organized by the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI) at HSE University, the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe at GWZO Leipzig, the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, and Justus Liebig University Giessen.

Touching different types of surfaces may incur certain emotions. This was the conclusion made by psychologists in a recent empirical study. Previously, emotional perception was generally studied in relation to visual and audial modalities.