Research & Expertise news at HSE University

The HSE International Laboratory for Mirror Symmetry and Automorphic Forms, which is among several international laboratories to recently open within the Higher School of Economics, was created in December 2016 as part of the Russian government’s mega-grants program. Below, the lab’s academic supervisor, Ludmil Katzarkov, along with deputy heads Valery Gritsenko and Viktor Przyjalkowski, explain why the laboratory is fully capable of becoming a unique multidisciplinary unit dedicated to the study of mirror symmetry, automorphic forms, and number theory.

Researchers from the HSE Centre for Cognition & Decision Making and the Control of Complex Systems Laboratory (Russian Academy of Sciences) have conducted a series of experiments to uncover what a person actually controls when they are tasked with independently affecting the activity of their own brain. This discovery may help develop non-pharmacological methods for treating epilepsy, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and depression.

A team of researchers from the HSE Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis (LAMBDA) has won a contest held by the Presidential Research Funding Programme. Researchers with the laboratory are developing a system of algorithms that will help physicists look for new particles in the Large Hadron Collider.

HSE researchers examined the structure of online communities of Russian AIDS denialists – people who deny the reality of HIV and AIDS – and the manner in which they spread their ideas. The findings are published in American Behavioral Scientist.

Centre for Health Economics, Management and Policy - or CHEMP, as it is known - was launched two years ago. Today CHEMP offers a unique opportunity to unite and internationalize the emerging body of education and research in the field of health studies. CHEMP’s Director Professor Christopher Gerry, Chair of Internationalisation Steering Group and Academic Adviser to Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at HSE St. Petersburg, provides an update on the Centre’s activities and achievements.

In mid-June 2017, the town of Pushkin near St. Petersburg, Russia welcomed the Fifth International Summer School on Higher Education Research, a joint initiative between the HSE Institute of Education and Peking University’s China Institute for Educational Finance Research. This year, the Summer School focused on higher education and social inequality.

HSE researchers have used computer modelling to demonstrate the varying manipulability of decision-making procedures and to identify those least susceptible to manipulation. Their findings are published in the paper 'Manipulability of Majority Relation-based Collective Decision Rules'.

According to international studies, values can impact corporate performance and the bottom line either directly or indirectly. In the paper 'Corporate Values ​​and Profits of Commercial Banks: Correlation with Profits', Elena Prosvirkina and Nikolai Prosvirkin have examined the corporate values commonly declared by Russian banks and found that the widely held values of customer focus and efficiency can bring competitive advantage, but do not impact financial performance directly.