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Well-educated women having three or more children often try to return to work after maternity leave but face penalties for motherhood and 'overqualification', as potential employers offer them lower paid, lower-ranking jobs and treat them as second-rate employees. Some mothers of many children choose to leave the labour market altogether. A paper by Zlata Dorofeeva, Research Fellow of the HSE Institute for Social Policy's Centre for Longitudinal Studies, offers an insight into the career struggles faced by mothers of many children in Russia.

In the more than 10 years since it was established, the HSE International Centre of Decision Choice and Analysis has travelled a long way from a laboratory to an academic centre of gravity for globally renowned scholars.Fuad Aleskerov, Professor in the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences and Director of the HSE International Centre of Decision Choice and Analysis, spoke about the evolution of the centre’s team, its research activity, and solving Arctic dilemmas through the use of mathematical models.

The laboratory will study natural language texts, develop deep learning methods for their generation, and analyze computational linguistic data. Yandex, as a project partner, will help attract leading experts in artificial intelligence and data analysis to work in the laboratory on a long-term basis. The laboratory will be headed by Ivan Yamshchikov, Yandex Research Fellow and Associate Professor of Informatics at HSE University – St. Petersburg.

To what extent do the countries of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) benefit from an open economy? What financial, scientific, and educational policy tools will contribute to the implementation of the recently approved ‘Strategic Directions for the Development of Eurasian Economic integration until 2025’? These questions were discussed by participants in a series of expert discussions at the XXII April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development organised by HSE University and Sberbank.

In order to remain competitive in the labour market, university graduates must be proficient not only in professional knowledge and skills, but also in a set of universal competences (UC). However, higher education systems face problems in assessing such competences due to a lack of developed approaches and methodologies. A report released by the HSE Institute of Education, ‘An Assessment of Universal Competences as Higher Education Learning Outcomes’, analyses the ways in which these challenges have been addressed in both Russia and abroad.

The Russian Ministry of Education and Science has approved a new nomenclature of specializations in which academic degrees are conferred in Russia. The new list includes 21 new fields, including cognitive science. Maria Falikman, Head of the HSE School of Psychology, discusses the history of cognitive science, its formation at HSE, and its prospects for development.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a fundamental component of many activities in economics and finance in recent years. On April 26,Panos Pardalos, Academic Supervisor at theLaboratory of Algorithms and Technologies for Networks Analysis (LATNA at HSE Nizhny Novgorod) and Distinguished Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida, will talk about its impact, future developments and limitations in his honorary lecture Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Economics and Finance.

What is affect and why is it important for humans? How can feelings be defined and what is their relation to emotions and consciousness? What might be used in making a soft robot? Professor Antonio Damasio (University of Southern California, USA) discussed these and other questions in his honorary lecture, entitled 'Feeling, Knowing, and Artificial Intelligence'.The talk was delivered on April 16 at the at the XXII April International Academic Conference held by HSE University jointly with Sberbank.

General wealth levels in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have been improving since 2012 — poverty has been decreasing. But due to COVID, global poverty levels, including those of these regions, may increase considerably for the first time in two decades. Samuel Freije-Rodriguez, Lead Economist at World Bank, talked about this at the XXII April Conference organized by HSE University and Sberbank.

Anastasia Malashina, a doctoral student at HSE University, has proposed a new method to assess vulnerabilities in encryption systems, which is based on a brute-force search of possible options of symbol deciphering. The algorithm was also implemented in a programme, which can be used to find vulnerabilities in ciphers. The results of the study were published in a paper ‘Software development for the study of natural language characteristics’.