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Irina Abankina, Director of the HSE Institute of Education, Tenured Professor and Member of the HSE Academic Council, spoke about her life in academia and work at HSE, for the project ‘Research at HSE: For School and for Life’.

It is possible to enrol at a Russian university without sitting the Unified State Exam (USE) via a 'hybrid' vocational track originally created to encourage upward mobility of disadvantaged social groups. According to the authors of Slipping Past the Test: Heterogeneous Effects of Social Education in the Context of Inconsistent Selection Mechanisms in Higher Education, this pathway to university is also frequently used as a strategic option by students from upper-class families. These individuals constitute almost 40% of those entering university via a vocational track.

Luca Iemi from HSE University, jointly with Niko A Busch from Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, have found that the state of excitability of the brain — indexed byspontaneous neural oscillations - biases a person’s subjective perceptual experience, rather than their decision-making strategy. The findings will be published in eNeurounder the title ‘Moment-to-moment fluctuations in neuronal excitability bias subjective perception rather than decision-making’.

The Laboratory of Algorithms and Technologies for Networks Analysis (LATNA)  in Nizhny Novgorod is one of HSE’s international laboratories. It is co-supervised by Panos Pardalos, Distinguished Professor at the University of Florida, and Valery Kalyagin, Professor and Department Head at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Informatics. Professor Kalyagin told The HSE Look about the lab’s research projects, its work with students, and engagement in the educational life of the campus and HSE at large.

The new institute will be engaged in research and educational activities and will provide expert and analytical support for state projects in the field of environmental safety, as well as for projects outlined by Russia's federal policy in the Arctic.

The big scanning antenna at the Pushchino Radio Astronomy Observatory logs almost 90 GB of data every day. The data are usually processed by the astronomers manually. Vladimir Samodurov and Alexander Gorbunov, researchers at the HSE Faculty of Business and Management, decided to relieve the scholars from this hard work and give this job to neural networks. They shared the results of their work in the paper ‘Perspectives of intellectual processing of large volumes of astronomical data using neural networks’.

Researchers at the Higher School of Economics have proposed a new method of recognizing people on video with the help of a deep neural network. The approach does not require a large number of photographs and it has a significantly higher recognition accuracy compared to already existing methods — even if only one photo of a person is available. The results of the work have been published in the articles ‘Fuzzy Analysis and Deep Convolution Neural Networks in Still-to-Video Recognition’.

According to the researchers of the HSE International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation, personality development is associated with positive acceptance of solitude. Their study is based on a survey of 204 respondents (41 men and 163 women), mostly students, aged 16 to 25.

In 1937, an editorial team set up by the Pravdanewspaper produced the Tvorchestvo narodov SSSR [Works of the People of the USSR] poetry anthology, of which more than half were Russian translations of poems written in Armenian, Ukrainian, Kazakh and other languages spoken in different parts of the USSR. Designed to showcase cultural diversity, the anthology was in fact an example of colonial homogenisation. Translators and literary workers had tweaked the originals to suit metropolitan standards and their own ideals of good poetry, according to the Soviet Folklore as Translation Project by Elena Zemskova, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Philology.

Fedor Ratnikov, a leading researcher at the Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis (LAMBDA), has been appointed project coordinator in the SHiP collaboration. He will be responsible for developing and designing the detector’s active magnetic radiation shielding.