Research & Expertise

In early September, the HSE University Faculty of Computer Science hosted the international conference Computer Methods of Cognitome Analysis. The event was organised by the International Laboratory of Algebraic Topology and Its Applications at the faculty.

An international team of scientists from the UK, Spain, Denmark and Russia (including researchers from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience) conducted an experiment demonstrating that people automatically integrate extralinguistic information into grammatical processing during verbal communication. The study findings were published in the Scientific Reports Journal.

The Eastern Economic Forum took place place in Vladivostok. The participants of the ‘Eastern Dimension of International Cooperation in the Arctic’ session stated that joint research will help to find mutual understanding between the circumpolar states and the countries of the Asia-Pacific region. HSE News Service covers some sessions in which experts from HSE University took part.

A team of researchers from HSE MIEM, LPI RAS, and the University of Southern California have applied machine learning to the analysis of internal defects in perovskite solar cells and proposed ways to improve their energy efficiency. The findings of the study performed on the Cs₂AgBiBr₆ double perovskite can be used to develop more efficient and durable perovskite-based materials. The paper has been published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

An international team of astrophysicists has been studying the formation of strong electrostatic waves, ion holes, in the Earth's magnetotail and assessing their impact on space weather. They found that ion holes propagate oblique to the local magnetic field. The study's findings can contribute to a better understanding of processes in the Earth's magnetotail which affect space weather in the near-Earth plasma environment and the polar region. The paper is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

HSE University researchers together with colleagues from Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the University of Pennsylvania examined the determinants of episodic volunteer satisfaction and its impact on the motivation to continue volunteering.

Academics’ work week became even longer during the pandemic. This is true of researchers from different countries, independently of their gender and specialisation, an international research team with HSE University participation found. Their working time during the pandemic was 51 hours compared to the usual 40. The increased number of working hours per week seems to have become part of the new academic norm. The results of the study were published in the Plos One journal.

In their paper published in Science in 2021, a DeepMind team showed how neural networks can be used to describe electron interactions in chemical systems more accurately than existing methods. A team of researchers from Skoltech, the Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry, HSE University, Yandex, and Kyungpook National University show in their comment in Science that DeepMind AI’s ability to generalise the behaviour of such systems does not follow from the published results and requires revisiting, the Skoltech website says.

World Brain Day is observed on July 22 every year. The HSE News Service asked researchers of the HSE Centre for Cognition and Decision Making about the impact of neurological conditions on mental health, using cervical dystonia (CD) as an example. Ainur Ragimova, Research Fellow of the Centre, discusses current studies into cervical dystonia at HSE University and worldwide and explains how patients' quality of life can be improved by proper treatment.

The SNAD team, an international network of researchers including Matvey Kornilov, Associate Professor of the HSE University Faculty of Physics, has discovered 11 previously undetected space anomalies, seven of which are supernova candidates. The researchers analysed digital images of the Northern sky taken in 2018 using a k-D tree to detect anomalies through the ‘nearest neighbour’ method. Machine learning algorithms helped automate the search. The paper is published in New Astronomy.