Research & Expertise News at HSE University

The HSE Centre for African Studies has marked its fifth anniversary. It was established to support Russian companies and government bodies in their engagement with countries across the continent and, over the years, has proved its effectiveness and uniqueness. A ceremonial event to mark the centre’s anniversary was held at HSE’s Cultural Centre.

Mathematicians at HSE University believe that there is no need to fear losing jobs because of the widespread use of AI, while at the same time they warn against uncritical acceptance of works and projects prepared with its help. AI, however, can be a useful tool in research, creating models and processing large volumes of information.

The first Intervision song contest recently came to an end in Moscow. The winner was the Vietnamese entrant, Đức Phúc. The voting system for the contest was developed by Fuad Aleskerov, a renowned mathematician, expert in game theory and decision-making, and Distinguished Professor at HSE University. He shared the details with the HSE News Service.

Alexander Sorokin, Dean of the School of Social Sciences at HSE University–St Petersburg, was a key speaker at the Himalaya Calling global summit at UPES University in India.

On September 15–16, 2025, the HSE Centre of Classical and Oriental Archaeology at the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, Faculty of Humanities, held an international conference marking the fifth anniversary of excavations carried out by HSE archaeologists as part of the Parion Mission of Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun, at the agora of Parion.

Researchers from the MECO international project, including experts from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain, have developed a tool for analysing data on English text reading by native speakers of more than 19 languages. In a large-scale experiment involving over 1,200 people, researchers recorded participants’ eye movements as they silently read the same English texts and then assessed their level of comprehension. The results showed that even when comprehension levels were the same, the reading process—such as gaze fixations, rereading, and word skipping—varied depending on the reader's native language and their English proficiency. The study has been published in Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

Having a mortgage increases the likelihood that a Russian family will plan to have a child within the next three years by 39 percentage points. This is the conclusion of a study by Prof. Elena Vakulenko and doctoral student Rufina Evgrafova from the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences. The authors emphasise that this effect is most pronounced among women, people under 36, and those without children. The study findings have been published in Voprosy Ekonomiki.

Regular, long-term seminars are an important part of the work of HSE research teams. Petr Parshakov, Professor at the School of Economics and Finance of the Faculty of Computer Science, Economics, and Social Sciences at HSE University–Perm and Head of the International Laboratory of Intangible-Driven Economy, talks about the laboratory’s regular seminars: why such meetings are needed, how they are organised, the secret of successful seminars, and the place seminars hold today in academic life.