Research & Expertise news at HSE University

Natalia Lyskova is spending her 2nd year as a postdoc at HSE Faculty of Physics working in a Joint Department of Space Physics with the Space Research Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The HSE Look talked to her about the ongoing research and upcoming plans.

On November 26, the HSE Faculty of Computer Science held the ‘IT Girls Night’ for the fifth time. This year the event was organized within the University of London’s campaign ‘Worldwide Conversation on Women’s Higher Education and Equality in the Workplace’. This campaign celebrates 150 years since the University of London opened up its ‘Special Examinations for Women’, the first university-level examinations offered for women in the UK. Ten years later, this step led to the University of London becoming the first institution of higher education in the UK to open up full degrees for women.

One of the most obvious changes that comes with ageing is that people start doing things more slowly. Numerous studies have shown that ageing also affects language processing. Even neurologically healthy people speak, retrieve words and read more slowly as they get older. But is this slowdown inevitable? Researchers from the Higher School of Economics have been working to answer this question in their article ‘No evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing in sentence processing’.

A contemporary city expands; it is stitched together with communications, but lacks integrity. Districts, urban communities and practices are so heterogeneous, that they often don’t interact with each other. A united space is split into fragments. Communication is replaced with alienation. Dmitry Zamyatin, geographer and researcher of culture, chief research fellow at the HSE Graduate School of Urbanism, called this phenomenon a ‘post-city’. The scholar spoke to IQ.HSE about this issue.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed Decree No. 672 on November 26 'On the creation of an innovation cluster in Moscow,' thus putting in motion an initiative of Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin that the Higher School of Economics had played an active role in developing. Throughout the past year, HSE specialists studied the best practices of the world’s innovative megacities, worked with the Moscow government to hold a series of expert discussions on the principles of forming an innovation supercluster, and developed a draft concept establishing guidelines for interactions between potential cluster participants. Over time, the planned supercluster has the potential to embrace Moscow’s entire advanced-technology economy.

Tenured HSE Professor Fuad Aleskerov, who is the head of the Faculty of Economic Sciences’ Department of Mathematics, has become a member of the Informatics section of the Academia Europaea.

IQ.HSE continues its series of HSE* expert reports on the legal regulation of new technologies. The first article in the series dealt with artificial intelligence. Today’s article looks at self-driving vehicles.

On November 20-24, Salvatore Zappala, Associate Professor of Organizational Change and Development, University of Bologna, School of Psychology, is visiting HSE Moscow as part of the programme of cooperation between HSE and the University of Bologna. Professor Zappala and Evgeniya Kravchenko, Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology of the Faculty of Social Sciences, shared their expectations of the visit with HSE News Service.