Registration for the fifth season of the Russian Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence has opened. This year, the competition has gained international status. The event is open to students in the 8–11 grades both in Russia and abroad. The winners will receive benefits when applying to Russian universities.

For more than five years, the HSE International Laboratory of Bioinformatics has been advancing cutting-edge research. During this time, its scientists have achieved major breakthroughs, including the development of CARDIOLIFE—a unique genetic test that predicts the likelihood of cardiovascular disease. With the active participation of HSE students, the team is working on a new generation of medicines. In this interview with the HSE News Service, Laboratory Head Maria Poptsova shares insights into their work.

At an international foresight workshop on artificial intelligence held at HSE University, Russian and foreign scholars discussed the trends and challenges arising from the rapid development of AI.

The International BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre at HSE University presented the scientific report ‘From Fields to Futures: Competition, Financialisation, and Digitalisation in Global Grain Value Chains.’ The presentation took place at an academic conference on September 12 in Cape Town, which the BRICS Centre organised together with the University of Cape Town on the sidelines of the 9^th BRICS International Competition Conference.

At the end of August, a forum ‘Territory of the Future. Moscow 2030’ took place at the Museon Art Park, where students from different universities demonstrated their inventions and art installations. Graduates of the HSE Art and Design School presented the first Russian autonomous flying robot, Belka, and medical equipment designed for disinfecting donated blood, Ance. They shared details of their projects with the HSE News Service.

Researchers from the MECO international project, including experts from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain, have developed a tool for analysing data on English text reading by native speakers of more than 19 languages. In an experiment involving over 1,200 people, researchers recorded participants’ eye movements as they silently read English texts and assessed their level of comprehension. The results showed that even when comprehension levels were the same, gaze fixations, rereading, and word skipping varied depending on the reader's native language.

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) pose challenges not only in medicine, but also in education, social policy, and technology. Scientists, doctors, educators, and government representatives have discussed how science and practice can help people with such disorders at the conference ‘Autism. Challenges and Solutions.’ For the first time, the event has been held at HSE University.

Regular, long-term seminars are an important part of the work of HSE research teams. Petr Parshakov, Professor at the School of Economics and Finance of the Faculty of Computer Science, Economics, and Social Sciences at HSE University–Perm and Head of the International Laboratory of Intangible-Driven Economy, talks about the laboratory’s regular seminars: why such meetings are needed, how they are organised, the secret of successful seminars, and the place seminars hold today in academic life.

Superconductivity is a state of matter in which electric current flows without any energy loss. In materials with defects, it emerges at very low temperatures. An international team of scientists, including physicists from HSE MIEM, has demonstrated that when defects are arranged in a specific pattern, superconductivity can occur at a higher temperature. This discovery could help develop superconductors that operate without the need for extreme cooling.