Research & Expertise

Storing the data collected during folklore expeditions in a convenient and accessible way is not an easy task. As a solution, HSE researchers studying folk traditions have created an Electronic Folklore Archive. Anastasia Smirnova, research assistant and, until recently, staff member of the HSE Faculty of Humanities Laboratory for Theoretical and Field Folklore Studies, where the electronic archive was designed and developed, talks about how it was created and why the skills of collecting and digitising folklore are so important, particularly at the outset of one's academic career.

Another online seminar has been held by the project team ‘Regulatory framework to prevent remote work-related psychosocial risks’ of the HSE University Faculty of Law. On October 15, Lacye Groening, ILO Technical Officer on Occupational Safety and Health spoke abouton how to manage work-related psychosocial risks during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond from a global perspective.

The conference on Philosophy and Culture in Time of Pandemics ran from September 30 to 2 October 2021. It was divided into seven sessions held in a hybrid format. The organizers and participants discussed major topics such as social transformation during the pandemic, the role of mass media in shaping perceptions of the pandemic, and the epistemological and ethical issues that have arisen as a result.

Researchers of the HSE Graduate School of Business have presented a new method of forecasting bankruptcies in businesses using machine learning. The method makes it possible to fully utilize information on a company’s financial state and to make more accurate predictions than traditional statistical approaches. The research has been published in the journal Expert Systems with Applications.

Experts from the World Bank and HSE University discussed the gender gap in salaries in different countries and the impact of socio-cultural, economic and behavioural factors on differences in earnings.

The pandemic has forced many companies to rethink their approach to charity and to change their priorities in terms of corporate social responsibility. Meeting the needs of the elderly, women, and people with disabilities is a top priority, and the social agenda is becoming a key part of HSE University’s educational programmes. These topics were discussed at the business dialogue on Corporate Social Responsibility Beyond COVID-19 hosted by the HSE Graduate School of Business.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated our swift adaptation to big challenges and strengthened cooperation ties between researchers, politicians, and entrepreneurs on national and global levels. The accumulated life and goal setting practices in the new reality will be discussed on October 15–26, 2021 by participants of the XI International Academic Conference ‘Foresight and Science, Technology and Innovation Policy’ organised by the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge (ISSEK).

This September, work was in full swing at HSE University’s Laboratory for Psychology of Social Inequality. The laboratory, which was established in spring 2021, is the first research centre in Russia devoted to researching perceptions of inequality in various fields. IQ.HSE spoke to Elena Agadullina, head of the laboratory, about the research projects underway at the lab, the psychological mechanisms that support and maintain inequality, and Russia-specific trends in the field.

Researchers of the Laboratory of Complex Systems Modeling and Control have proposed a missing component of the mechanism of self-organized criticality, which will enable the reproduction of power-law patterns observed in the real world. According to the researchers, this can be used to improve our understanding of the the processes leading to strong earthquakes, forest fires, financial market crashes, and a sudden synchronization of social networks. The results of the research were published in the Scientific Reports journal.

Students and researchers from HSE University and the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics have examined the widely known ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ game using methods from statistical physics. They used the mean-field concept, a common tool for studying the physics of many-particle systems, to describe human decision-making processes. Researchers suggest that this model may be helpful for understanding systems with many participants. The results of the study are published in the September issue of the Physics Review Research journal.