News

The telephone was invented more than 150 years ago. The history of its invention reads like a detective novel, replete with painstaking work, serendipitous discoveries, moments of enlightenment, and legal battles. Even more intriguing are the events that led to the worldwide adoption of this technology. In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The first episode in the series recounts the story of Emperor Pedro II of Brazil demonstrating Bell's telephone at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

HSE University economists have found that more than 60% of Russians rely on self-treatment instead of visiting a doctor, something which is facilitated by the easy availability of medicines in Russian pharmacies. This is especially typical for mild illnesses. Buying medicines depends on income, and quite often people replace expensive medicines with cheaper ones. The article was published in the International Journal of Health Economics and Management.

On August 22, 2023, the Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Centre (HCMRC) opened an exhibition as part of the Technoprom 2023 forum in Novosibirsk. On the opening day, more than 300 people visited the stand, of which more than 50 took part in an interactive ‘anthropologist simulator’ and a visual attention test. The HSE News Service reports on the exposition and the feedback received by the experts.

In August, the HSE University-St Petersburg Summer School came to an end. The participants attended courses in political science, Russian, and finance given by professors of HSE University-St Petersburg, got to know the city, and saw the sights as part of the cultural programme. The summer school hosted students from nine countries: China, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Germany, Uzbekistan and Russia.

Behrang Kamali-Shahdadi, from Iran, recently joined the HSE University Department of Theoretical Economics as an assistant professor and will start teaching courses in autumn 2023. In his interview, he shares his experiences of getting a PhD from an Ivy League university, working at a new university in Iran, and his research on matching attorneys to poor defendants, unskilled workers to firms, and baby boomers to universities.

Researchers of the HSE Graduate School of Business trained a machine-learning (ML) model to infer users' subjective wellbeing from social media posts. Having processed 10 million tweets, the researchers compiled a rating of holidays celebrated in Russia based on their popularity. The New Year tops the list, but Russian-speaking users of Twitter are also happy to celebrate Defender of the Fatherland Day, International Women's Day, and Halloween. The study findings have been published in PeerJ Computer Science.

Thu Trang Pham is a 23-year old HSE University student from Vietnam. She is currently in her fourth year of studies at theFaculty of World Economy and International Relations. Thu Trang spoke to the HSE News Service about why HSE is the perfect university for international students, life in her dormitory, and how she plans to make the most of her final year of studies by travelling around Moscow and Russia.

September 15 is the deadline to submit application documents for the Master’s in Applied Statistics with Network Analysis, Russia’s first English-language online programme in applied statistics. The HSE University programme trains specialists capable of working with data for strategising business processes and analysing the system of interactions between companies and people.