Men Willing to Pay More for Chocolate Than Women
Researchers at HSE University in Perm have used electroencephalography (EEG) to determine that consumers are willing to pay 10% more for chocolate when they know it to be a premium product. On the other hand, if consumers are aware that a chocolate product is inexpensive, their willingness to pay decreases by 13%. On average, men are willing to pay 8.8 monetary units more for chocolate than women, and men's willingness to pay decreases by 0.3 monetary units with each additional year of age. The study has been published in Food Quality and Preference.
Researchers from HSE University and Artificial Intelligence Research Institute Train Neural Network to Learn Much More Efficiently
Neural network generative models have achieved impressive results in recent years, but researchers are still working on increasing their efficiency. Researchers from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science and AIRI have managed to optimize the finetuning of the StyleGAN2 neural network, which creates realistic images, to new domains, reducing the number of trained parameters by four orders of magnitude. At the same time, the quality of the obtained images remained high. The results of this work were presented at the NeurIPS 2022 conference.
HSE Days Begin in Kazakhstan
A series of plenary sessions, master classes, and seminars is underway in the Kazakh capital as part of the HSE Days event at the Miras international school and Astana International University. Guests of the interactive research and educational intensive will learn about the latest achievements in humanitarian science, management, and processes for building sustainable communication with partners from Eurasian countries.
Capabilities as an Indicator of Poverty
Using a multidimensional approach, sociologists from HSE University have identified some vulnerable categories of the population that have rarely been the focus of research on poverty. According to their calculations, pensioners and people with disabilities also fall into the ‘poor’ category. The study was published in the Russian Journal of Economics.
HSE University Leads in Four Subject Rankings of ‘Three University Missions’ Rankings
In 2023, HSE University took first place in the ‘Three University Missions’ subject rankings in economics, sociology, management and psychology. The university also entered the top three in terms of the number of subjects covered by the rankings.
‘Most Subjects Require Skills in Programming Languages Such as R and Python’
Is it possible to study economics and programming at the same time, and more importantly, why is it necessary? Arina Ogurtsova is studying on HSE University’s full-time online Master’s programme in Economic Analysis while also taking the Python Developer course at Yandex Practicum. In their interview, Arina and the staff of the programmes talk about how economics and IT are inseparable and why combining disciplines is useful.
HSE University Enhances Publication Activity in 6 Subjects in ‘Expert’ Ranking
The ‘Expert’ analytical centre has published its ranking of the publication activity of Russian universities for 2023. HSE University has improved its position in six subjects and two narrow sections.
Income and Cost of Living Distribution Found to Be Similar in Russia and US
Researchers at the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences Laboratory for Wealth Measurement analysed income and cost of living data at the sub-regional level in Russia (municipalities) and in the US (counties). The study reveals that territorial differences in the cost of living are more pronounced in Russia compared to the United States. However, the distribution of overall income across settlements of varying sizes is quite comparable in both countries. The article has been published in the HSE Economic Journal.
People Spend 1/6th of their Lifetime on Enhancing Their Appearance
An international team including HSE researchers has conducted the largest ever cross-cultural study of appearance-enhancing behaviours. They have found that people worldwide spend an average of four hours a day on enhancing their beauty. Caring for one's appearance does not depend on gender, and older people worry as much about looking their best as the young do. The strongest predictor of attractiveness-enhancing behaviours appears to be social media usage. The study findings have been published in Evolution and Human Behaviour.
‘Not Once since I Decided to Pursue Science Have I Ever Been Bored’
Sergey Samsonov could have become a historian or worked in a hedge fund, but he devoted himself to mathematics. In this interview with the HSE Young Scientists project, he explained why he chose research in statistics and machine learning and how to generate a million images of cats.