Research & Expertise news at HSE University

From November 9 – 13, the HSE Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge is organizing its Tenth International Academic Conference ‘Foresight and STI Policy’. The conference has been acknowledged by OECD as one of the world’s most important forums of foresight researchers. It will the tenth time that the conference brings together Russian and international experts from the leading think tanks, research centres and universities, national ministries and government bodies, development institutes and high-tech companies from over 20 countries.

While 9th-graders and 11th-graders are busy respectively preparing for the Basic State Exam (BSE) and Unified State Exam (U.S.E.), their parents are the ones who lay the groundwork for their success. However, if parental assistance turns into pressure, it can produce the opposite effect on young people, HSE University researchers note. Here, we look at how parents can help their children do well on the Unified State Exam.

On the first day of the XI International Russian Higher Education Conference (RHEC), which was held online, representatives of universities and colleges discussed the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Russia’s education system.

A group of Moscow scientists has discovered and explained the activity mechanism of a new anti-cancer molecule — diphenylisoxazole. This molecule has been shown to be effective against human cancer cells. The research, published in the journal Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters, makes it possible to produce an affordable cancer treatment drug.

The pandemic has put global development on hold and this is a chance for Russia to occupy market niches that were previously closed. But innovation should become as essential as air and, without information technology, new niches will still not be open. Alexander Chulok, Director of the HSE UniversityCentre for Science and Technology Foresight, spoke about this in a special report at the global conference‘Accelerate Global 2020’.

In October, Professor Holger Kusse, Leading Research Fellow of the International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue lectured at the seminar ‘West and East: The Universalism of Culture’. We spoke with Holger Kusse about his work in Germany and Europe, his research, and his plans for the 2020-2021 academic year.

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.