News

Researchers at HSE and Lomonosov Moscow State University analyzed data on Russians’ movements during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their analysis showed that residents of lower-income municipalities self-isolated less compared to residents of higher-income cities. The findings were published in the journal Environment and Planning A.

Students need digital skills, both in life and in their future work. But many universities are not yet ready to provide students with them, despite the current circumstances in which universities have had to transition to online learning due to the COVID-19 epidemic. The development of online formats has been uneven: there are bright leaders and the rest modestly ‘stand aside’. They lack resources, confidence in digital education, and a regulatory framework. At the eSTARS International Conference organised by HSE University in partnership with Coursera, experts discussed the challenges of digitalisation in higher education.

Online learning for schoolchildren — a temporary solution authorities have implemented due to the COVID-19 epidemic — has generated a lot of heated debate. Families worry about the quality and outcomes of online learning, and teachers worry about the excessive workload. School heads have their own headache about how to organise the remote learning. A year has passed since the start of the pandemic, and students have been attending their classes online since March — it is already possible to take stock and look at the situation in a comprehensive and impartial manner, which is what a team of HSE researchers has done. Here are the main results of their study and their proposed solutions to the most pressing problems.

Mikhail Guschin, Research Fellow at the HSE University Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis of the Faculty of Computer Science, was appointed coordinator of the machine learning and statistics working group in the LHCb Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). He will be the only representative of a Russian University among the coordinators for the experiment’s working groups.

In assessing an employee’s performance, employers often listen to his immediate supervisor or colleagues, and these opinions can be highly subjective. Sergey Stepanov, an economist from HSE University, has shown that biased evaluations can actually benefit employers. An article substantiating this finding was published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

On December 4, the International Advisory Board of the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge of HSE University met for its annual meeting. It was an anniversary event, as was the X Foresight Conference that preceded it. Largely thanks to the online format, the assembled board was the most representative of the field in its history. Experts from 20 international partner centres assessed ISSEK’s activities over the past year and proposed a wide range of topics for new research.

In 2020, against the backdrop of the coronavirus crisis and other global challenges that are increasing uncertainty, HSE University social scientists recorded the most significant shift in people’s perception of current fundamental social and economic issues. In particular, respondents expressed increased approval of the government, higher demands of it, as well as higher levels of ‘profound’ civic activity and self-confidence.

A team of HSE researchers—Nataliya Matveeva, Ivan Sterligov, and Maria Yudkevich—have analyzed the research activity of universities participating in Russia’s  Academic Excellence Project 5-100. Overall, the quality of publications of these universities has improved. Collectively, participating universities have tripled their number of publications in reputable journals in the past three years, and researchers have begun to collaborate with each other more frequently. The study was published in the Journal of Informetrics.

43 projects from all over the country were awarded grants in Russia’s Eighth Mega-Grant Competition. HSE University’s application in support of the creation of a world-class laboratory in mathematics was among the winners. The academic supervisor of the new laboratory will be Professor Michael Shapiro of Michigan State University (USA).

Representatives of governmental bodies and international organizations joined BRICS experts to discuss anti-corruption education at a roundtable that took place on December 1 as a videoconference. Representatives of HSE university participated in the event organization and the discussion itself.