Research & Expertise news at HSE University

On April 9, the XX April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development kicked off at HSE University. Since its inception, it has become Russia’s biggest academic and expert platform in the social sciences and economics, as well as an important international event that attracts researchers from all over the globe each year. Fuad Aleskerov and Andrey Yakovlev, members of the Conference Programme Committee, spoke with the HSE News Service about the results achieved over the past 20 years, relevant topics, and plans for the future.

The President of the Russian Federation welcomes participants and guests to the XX April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development.

Researchers from HSE University and Yandex, as part of the LHCb collaboration at CERN, have been the first to discover CP violation in charm meson decays.

Researchers at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience of the Higher School of Economics have proposed to train transplanted muscles in advance with new movements so that the brain can learn to use them more quickly after autotransplantation. The results of the study on the prospects of this approach were published in the article ‘Perspectives for the Use of Neurotechnologies in Conjunction with Muscle Autotransplantation in Children’.

Professor Carl Fey from Aalto University has been invited to speak at the 20th Annual April International Academic Conference at HSE Moscow. In his talk, entitled ‘Facilitating Innovation in Companies in Russia: The Role of Organizational Culture’, Professor Fey will present research that he has been conducting with his colleagues on the relationship between organizational culture and innovation. 

Waste sorting is recognized as the most effective way to deal with the world’s waste problem. Yet nearly 70% of Russians neither sort their garbage nor intend to.  But this is no reason to underestimate the population: 86% of Russians have adopted at least one of the habits outlined below to reduce household waste. Marina Shabanova studied the forms, motives, and potential of these practices. The results of the study will be presented at the 20th Annual April Conference at HSE.

Today, we have moved from the political concept of panem et circenses (bread and circuses) to keep the masses happy to the dangers of culture driven by spectacle and politics driven by algorithms. Post-war theoreticians of the crowd had personal experience of fascism, and today contemporary artists are attempting to address similar problems. During the XX April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development, scheduled this year for April 9-12 at the Higher School of Economics, Sarah Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, will explore some of these issues in her presentation 'Culture and Emigration, Crowds and Power.'

Redundancy and crisis — these are the words higher education experts Philip G. Altbach and Hans de Wit use to describe the situation in the global market of academic publications. It has been largely caused by external factors, such as the rise of university rankings that focus on the number of research and papers and pressure by publishers. But universities’ behavior is also an explanation for the crisis. Many of them try to imitate research universities and produce lots of publications of widely varying quality, the experts said in their paper in the HSE journal International Higher Education.