Research & Expertise news at HSE University

April International Academic Conference is held in a distributed format this year, with some sessions broadcast online and papers and video presentations from others posted on the conference website. Professor Dr Ger Graus, first Global Director of Education at KidZania, is an invited speaker at Digital Transformation of Education session that is also conducted in this new distributed form. His paper is devoted to preparing children for digital era through non-formal education.

In late March at the Kommunarka COVID-19 Hospital outside of Moscow, a pilot project was launched that allows healthcare professionals to coordinate their efforts remotely while working with coronavirus patients. The system, which is run using ‘smart glasses’, is now in operation at ten Moscow hospitals. Ilya Flaks, a graduate of HSE’s Master’s Programme in E-Business and project founder, spoke with the HSE News Service about how the smart glasses help doctors and what prospects lie ahead for using virtual reality (VR) in health care.

The OECD Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy (STP) held its first meeting of the year in early April. HSE staff members Mikhail Gershman, Dirk Meissner and Elena Sabelnikova joined Ministry of Education and Science representatives as members of the Russian delegation to the event. Here, they explain which approaches participants discussed for combating the coronavirus and for preventing other global crises.

The seemingly high rate of technological growth is illusory: the world is slowing down and will continue to do so long into the future. HSE scholars predict that the ‘technological singularity’ will occur in 2106 and that, contrary to what some expect, it will not mark the apotheosis of progress.  Here, Andrey Korotayev, Leading Research Fellow, Head of the HSE Laboratory for Monitoring the Risks of Socio-Political Destabilization and a co-author of this study tells IQ.HSE why global acceleration is now a thing of the past, prognosticators are unafraid of ‘black swans,’  and the coronavirus will not rewrite human history.

Most Russians would like to have two children: a boy and a girl. The others fall between the two extremes of either wanting no children (at least for now) or planning to have three or more. Having a large family is often associated with affluence. The reasons for having another child are many, from wishing to strengthen the family bond and teach older children to care for younger siblings to hoping that the maternity subsidy may help the family improve their housing situation. A HSE demographer used data from a sample of 15,000 respondents to study reproductive attitudes in Russia.

From April 6–7, the HSE Centre of Development Institute conducted a special survey among professional forecasters on the Russian economy’s prospects for 2020-2021. The experts expect a decline this year due to the coronavirus pandemic and low oil prices this year, but predict that the losses will be fully recouped in 2021.

The coronavirus pandemic is transforming modern society, reviving old social practices and formulas such as the Russian ‘flat-car-dacha’ principle, while opening new technological frontiers and creating new cultural skills. Professor Vitaly Kurennoy, Head of HSE’s School of Cultural Studies, discusses these issues in an op-ed for Izvestiia. Read the full translation of the article below.

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced universities to switch to online learning, which will probably foster the development of online higher education. HSE University researchers joined forces with their American colleagues to demonstrate that online learning at university can be as effective as traditional in-person education. Their research used the example of technology disciplines.