News

International Laboratory for Experimental Urban Design has recently opened at the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism. It will be headed by Vicente Guallart, a Spanish urbanist, chief architect for the city of Barcelona in 2011-2015, who will be joining HSE shortly. Mr. Guallart has talked to the HSE News Service about what the laboratory will do, what the Advanced Urban Design master’s programme, the principle of learning by doing, and the application of technology in the city life.

HSE took first place among Russian universities in subject rankings for Sociology and Economics & Econometrics (101-150 globally). In Business & Management Studies and Accouting & Finance, HSE ranked first and is currently the only Russian university in the ranking, placing in the 151-200 group.

In many countries, including but not limited to Russia, frontier regions, populated more recently than the country's core territory, tend to lag behind in terms of socio-economic development. This phenomenon can be explained by legacies such as state formation in remote regions and the autonomy traditionally enjoyed by new settlers, according to Roberto Foa (Harvard University) and Anna Nemirovskaya, Senior Research Fellow of the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR).

On March 18^th and 19^th, the Council on Enhancing the Competitiveness of Russia’s Leading Universities met in Moscow to discuss Russia’s role on the world academic stage. As a result, the Council recommended that the Ministry of Education and Science allocate subsidies to three groups of universities in 2016. HSE made it into the first group.

On March 16, Apostolis Papakostas, Professor of Sociology at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden gave a presentation of his book ‘Civilizing the Public Sphere: Distrust, Trust and Corruption’ at the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research. Examining the interplay between distrust, trust and corruption, this book maps out the social mechanisms that make actors and organizations in the public sphere perform their activities in a civilized manner.

Most employees and a significant proportion of managers are not briefed on their company's business strategy, while a quarter of all blue and white-collar workers are not informed about operational management issues. While Russian businesses are concerned about employee development, creating bench strength and adopting state-of-the-art ICT solutions, they use the latter only for transmitting orders from the top down. Veronica Kabalina, Kira Reshetnikova and Olga Zelenova of the HSE Department of Human Resources Management examined Russian businesses' approaches to HR development and corporate communications.

Second year Software Engineering students Anton Kondrashov and Alexander Lazarenko have taken first place in the Robot Battle hackathon organized by Yandex. Participants had to write a bot for any popular messaging service, that could quickly and easily solve users’ payment problems.

On March 11, Seth Bernstein gave a presentation — ‘Burying the Alliance: Interment, Repatriation and the Politics of the Sacred in Occupied Germany’ — at the scholarly seminar of the HSE International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences where he works as a postdoctoral research fellow.