Research & Expertise news at HSE University

The first international Forum of African Graduates of Russian and Soviet Universities has come to an end. The forum was held at HSE University in St Petersburg as part of the second Russia–Africa Summit.

HSE News Service spoke to Director of the Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences, Head of the Centre for Cognition and Decision Making at HSE University, Anna Shestakova about the achievements and goals of the new HSE University’s strategic project ‘Human Brain Resilience: Neurocognitive Technologies for Adaptation, Learning, Development, and Rehabilitation in a Changing Environment’.

Aleksey Kychkin, a researcher at the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Empirical Studies (LINES), and Oleg Gorshkov, a research assistant at LINES, received a patent for a system that predicts the spatial distribution of harmful substances in atmospheric air using an artificial intelligence unit. The invention can be used for integrated planning and notification of the risks of atmospheric air pollution by harmful substances. The work was carried out under a grant from the HSE University Artificial Intelligence Centre. The HSE News Service spoke with Aleksey Kychkin about the benefits of the new system, its application, and how it came to life.

The Russian Science Foundation has announced the results of the youth contests of the Presidential Programme. HSE University’s early-career researchers are receiving grants for research projects in economics, psychology, sociology, political science, law, mathematics, information science, optics, engineering, and ocean studies.

HSE researchers have examined the brain's reaction to violations of social norms and calculated a behavioural index to assess an individual's sensitivity to unfairness. This index can potentially be used to develop individualised rehabilitation programmes for patients with various types of behavioural disorders. The study has been published in Neuroscience Letters.

A group of researchers from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science and the Sber AI Lab has increased the speed of gradient boosting, one of the most efficient machine learning algorithms. The proposed approach will make it possible to solve classification and regression problems faster. The results of the work were presented at the NeurIPS conference.

The Ideas Centre for Advanced Interdisciplinary Research has announced the results of its 2023 competition. Five leading neuroscientists will receive grants to open graduate positions for early-career researchers who want to work on solutions to fundamental problems in this area. Three of the competition winners are scientists from HSE University: Matteo Feurra (HSE University in Moscow), Anastasia Kolmogorova (HSE University in St Petersburg), and Sofia Kulikova (HSE University in Perm).

An international team, including researchers of the HSE Faculty of Computer Science, has discovered a new mechanism of gene regulation in which microRNA assumes a central role. These non-coding molecules influence the DNA regions within genes that govern embryonic development. The study contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the diverse genetic programs found in complex multicellular organisms. The paper has been published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.