News

Third-year students of the Bachelor’s Programme in Applied Mathematics and Information Science Ivan Safonov, Ramazan Rakhmatullin, and Maxim Gorokhovsky won the Moscow Regional Contest—the first qualifying round of the international student world programming championship ICPC 2020/2021. In total, 45 HSE University took part, with 30 of them receiving certificates of various degrees.

At the twelfth BRICS summit held on November 17, Russian President Vladimir Putin and President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping spoke via videoconference about the importance of the BRICS Energy Research Cooperation Platform. Researchers from HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge and the Institute for Economics and Regulation of Natural Monopolies are involved in the work of the Platform.

This October, the Doctoral School of Arts and Design, together with HSE Art and Design School and Goldsmiths College, launched a new project. The Performance Artistic Research Laboratory (PeARL) brings together artists and scholars of various fields to collaborate in studies and experiments to develop ‘Practice as Research’ (PaR).

One of the biggest headlines of recent days has been the announcement made by Pfizer, a U.S.-based company, and BioNTech, Germany, that BNT162b2, a COVID-19 vaccine they are developing, has proved to be 90% effective in its Phase 3 clinical trial. The news was met with big excitement all over the world. However, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is based on a new platform, which is still understudied. According to protocol, its trial will be complete only in 2022. IQ talked to Larisa Popovich, Director of the HSE Institute for Health Economics, about the differences between the U.S.-German and the Russian Sputnik V vaccines, and about the chances of beating COVID-19 with massive immunization in the upcoming months.

Experts at HSE University and other universities discussed what constitutes a university virtue and whether it is possible to assess scientific and scholarly accomplishments based solely on quantitative criteria. At the conference ‘University HR Policies: Managing Staff Involvement’, Aleksei Pleshkov, Director of the Poletaev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities at HSE University, gave a talk entitled ‘In Search of Academic Ethics: Goodness, Virtues and Happiness’.

A team competition organised by the HSE Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics (MIEM HSE) will feature two leagues — one for HSE University students and another for secondary school students. The Hackathon partners are ‘MY.GAMES’ an international gaming brand that is part of Mail.ru Group, the educational website ‘GeekBrains’, and the not-for-profit Institute for Digital Transformation of Education (IDTE).

This year’s Big Animation Festival featured a number of films by HSE Art and Design School students and curators. Out of 1,501 applications received from 89 countries, the Festival jury selected 95 films to participate in the Russian competition and 90 for the foreign one. Twelve works by students of the Bachelor’s Programme ‘Animation and Illustration’, as well as six animated films by curators of HSE University Art and Design School made it into the competition. HSE News Service spoke with some of the participants about making video clips for popular musical groups, inspiration, and the importance of festivals.

Is it possible to make a DIY power bank? How can you create a green business while studying at university? What skills are essential in a start-up? Elizaveta Imaikina, Ulugbek Akhunzhanov, and Vadim Gorbunov answered these and other questions from the HSE News Service. These second-year master’s students of the HSE Graduate School of Business have launched the EcoLevel project as a result of a course in Internet Entrepreneurship.