HSE Science Battles: Complex Made Simple

On April 27^th,  the second ‘HSE Science Battles’ were held at the tech hub ‘Kluch’. The event brought together various participants, with Elizaveta Kuzmenko, who spoke about distributional semantics, winning the battle.

During the Science Battles, participants present their projects in simple words for 10 minutes without any slides or presentations. Then the audience and the jury choose the winner.

At the event Vasily Minkov, student of the Psychology programme, spoke about operant conditioning — a method of learning through rewards or punishments for certain behaviors and the possible use of this method in treating epilepsy.

Ella Tyuryumina, student of the Faculty of Computer Science and researcher at the International Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Structural Analysis, spoke about the prognosis of cancer by using an application based on a mathematical model.

The presentation by Gleb Garascchuk, doctoral  student of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs, was dedicated to the preferences of the investors in the US and the UK. Milena Rubleva, student of the Faculty of Communications, Media and Design, in her study demonstrated how media have changed the creation and the content of global history.

Linguist Elizaveta Kuzmenko, who spoke about the difficulties of determining how word meanings change in computer systems, won the battle.

 ‘It's an interesting idea and a new format for me,’ said Elizaveta, ‘ I thought that I could speak about my research in a scientific way, but I had never before tried to speak about this project in simple words for a general audience.’

Four more battles are scheduled for 2017. For more information please see our pages in Vkontakte and Facebook.

The ‘Science Battles’ project was the winner of the spring round of the Student Project Contest. The winners of the competition receive financial and organizational support from the Student Initiative Support Centre for the events.