Research & Expertise

Dr Anatoly Kharkhurin joined HSE University in 2019 as an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences. He received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the City University of New York and taught in the United States and the United Arab Emirates. This academic year he is teaching Psychology of Thinking and Reasoning and Psycholinguistics. Dr Kharkhurin shared with The HSE Look his perspective on the prospects for the digital transformation of social communication.

The new model, created by computational social scientist Ivan Smirnov of HSE University, predicts the academic success of Russian high school students with an accuracy of 94%. The model generates its predictions based on users’ distinctive vocabulary and speech patterns, and the predictions have strongly correlated with students’ Unified State Exam (USE) scores.

On October 23 – 24, 2020, the IX International Moscow Finance Conference will take place. The event has been organized jointly by ICEF and the London School of Economics. This year, the list of participants includes the editors of the two biggest journals in economics. Alexei Boulatov , Tenured Professor of HSE University, spoke about how the online format influenced the quality of academic events, what has changed in academic life over the last few months, and the topics that interest researchers today.

According to Natalia Tikhonova, a social scientist with HSE University, gender asymmetry has been on the rise in Russia's labour market over the past 20 years. Gender asymmetry is reflected in the ‘feminisation’ of white-collar jobs and a disproportionate number of men among blue-collar workers. In addition to this, increasing automation in traditionally male industrial sectors is leading to fewer jobs available to men. In contrast, occupations with a growing demand for skills tend to be those which are mainly filled by women.

Experts from the Laboratory for Labour Market Studies presented a report entitled ‘The Impact of Non-Cognitive Characteristics on Alcohol Consumption’ at HSE University. They talked about how different character traits affect the degree of dependence on alcohol.

According to HSE University’s Global Cities Innovation Index, New York and London are the world’s most attractive megacities to innovators implementing creative and technological initiatives. Moscow ranked among the rating’s top ten cities, leading in the areas of ‘Innovation Infrastructure’ and ‘Digital Infrastructure and Services’. HSE researchers presented the index at this year’s Open Innovations Forum.

Researchers at the HSE University Centre for Language and Brain, in cooperation with a professor of neuropsychology from Lomonosov Moscow State University and specialists from the Centre for Speech Pathology and Neuro-rehabilitation, evaluated the diagnostic validity of the Standardized Assessment of Reading Skills in Russian (SARS) and checked whether the available normative data are current. The results of the study, the updated levels for reading speed, as well as the control levels for evaluating these indicators, were published in The Russian Journal of Cognitive Science. 

On October 19, the first public presentation and discussion of the HSE Global Cities Innovation Index will take place at this year’s international Open Innovations Forum. The index, developed by HSE University researchers, is the first of its kind.

A team of Russian researchers with the participation of a leading researcher at HSE University, Ekaterina Pechenkova, found that during group problem solving the components of the social brain are co-activated, but they do not increase their coupling during cooperation as would be suggested for a holistic network. The study was published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Experts often blame income inequality for a wide range of social ills. They usually calculate its severity using special statistical indices drawn from official tax data or large-scale surveys of individual households. Such analyses create an objective picture and indicate the degree of inequality and the basic factors behind it.