Research & Expertise news at HSE University

Elsevier (operated by Scopus) has awarded its prestigious Research Excellence Award since 2005. This year, it celebrates the Year of Science and Technology in Russia. On March 30, Elsevier awarded the winning scholars, which included Maxim Kotsemir, Research Fellow at the HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge, and Dmitry Vetrov, Professor at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science.

At the 7^th International Research and Practical Conference ‘Sports Management in the Face of Uncertainty’, organized by HSE University, industry and government representatives discussed the impact of the pandemic on the sports industry, its future, and the problem of doping.

Using transcranial magnetic stimulation, Russians scientists were able to precisely track inter-muscle interactions between cortical representations of arm muscles. In the future, this method will help track brain changes in patients with motor disorders. The study was published in Human Brain Mapping. The project was supported by the Presidential Programme of the Russian Science Foundation (RSF).

In Russia, 2021 was declared the Year of Science and Technology. HSE has always paid special attention to the development of science, and more than 40 international laboratories have played an important role in the development of the university as a world research centre. One of the University’s first such laboratories was theRonald F. Inglehart Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR), named after its academic supervisor at the time, American sociologist and political scientist Ronald Inglehart. HSE News Service spoke with LCSR Laboratory Head and professor of sociology Eduard Ponarin (HSE – St. Petersburg) about the Laboratory’s work over the past decade.

During the pandemic, countries have endeavoured to protect their citizens without hurting their economies with excessive restrictions. At the seminar ‘Living with Covid-19: Optimal Lockdown Policies’, Hubert Kempf, academic supervisor of HSE University’s International Laboratory for Macroeconomic Analysis, presented a mathematical model that can be used to calculate the optimal level of restrictions.  

Many national governments have responded to the sharp rise in poverty during the pandemic with new social support programmes, including direct cash payments. During a joint seminar between the HSE Institute for Social Policy and the World Bank held as part of work conducted by the Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Centre,experts discussed approaches that have been implemented abroad and the prospects of a minimum guaranteed income in Russia.

Researchers Mario Guarracino from the HSE Laboratory of Algorithms and Technologies for Networks Analysis in Nizhny Novgorod and Julius Žilinskas and Algirdas Lančinskas from Vilnius University, have proposed a new method of testing for COVID-19. This group method allows results to be obtained 13 times faster as compared to individual testing of each sample. The research paper was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Russian scientists have proposed a new algorithm for automatic decoding and interpreting the decoder weights, which can be used both in brain-computer interfaces and in fundamental research. The results ofthe study were published in the Journal of Neural Engineering.