News

HSE University Student Development Office held its traditional Charity Xmas festival from December 1th to 5th. The event was open to HSE University students, staff and graduates, and anybody else who wished to attend. This year for the first time, it was online, but nonetheless brought together a large number of guests and speakers. The HSE News Service spoke about volunteering and charity in the Coronavirus era.

Audio ads in VK can drive a person crazy with their intrusiveness. What’s more, until the Instreamatic platform appeared, advertisers had been unable to evaluate user reaction to their ads. Project co-founder and HSE graduate Stas Tushinskiy now lives and works in Silicon Valley. In an interview with Success Builder, he describes today’s audio market, how our hatred of advertising is measured and what a San Francisco ‘propiska’ (residence permit) does for a business.

Students of the HSE Master's programme in Transmedia Production in Digital Industries joined efforts with staff of Moscow museums to create an e-book ‘Teenagers at Museums: How Curators and Tutors Help People Find Themselves’. The HSE News Service talked with the project authors about their choice of topic and what it is like to work as a book producer.

In 2020, against the backdrop of the coronavirus crisis and other global challenges that are increasing uncertainty, HSE University social scientists recorded the most significant shift in people’s perception of current fundamental social and economic issues. In particular, respondents expressed increased approval of the government, higher demands of it, as well as higher levels of ‘profound’ civic activity and self-confidence.

Emiliano Espinosa is from Rosario, an Argentinian city near the Paraná River—not far from Buenos Aires. He first came to Russia 8 years ago, in 2012, for a high school exchange year—he went to a Russian school in Krasnodar and lived with a Russian family. Now, after completing his Bachelor’s at RUDN Moscow, Emiliano Espinosa is a first-year student of the Master’s programme in ‘Media Management’ at HSE University. We spoke with him about his experience of living and studying in Russia.

Aleksey Maslov, Professor at HSE University’s School of Asian Studies and one of its founders, has become a super-media persona this year. This is due to major interest in China amid the pandemic and Beijing’s strained relationship with Washington. In the column ‘HSE University Scientists’, Aleksey Maslov explains how to keep up with everything (spoiler: Shaolin Monastery!), why Russian science has become a ‘fossil’, what scientists should do for self-promotion and why it’s important to look good at the same time.

HSE University together with the mobile network operator company MTS have launched a 360° live streaming system that supports VR format for remotely taught courses. HSE students can now attend lectures online both in regular format and, for the first time in Russia, in augmented reality format. Six lecture halls on HSE’s Moscow campus are now equipped with 360° panoramic video cameras and auto tracking cameras that follow the instructor’s movement in the classroom.

A team of HSE researchers—Nataliya Matveeva, Ivan Sterligov, and Maria Yudkevich—have analyzed the research activity of universities participating in Russia’s  Academic Excellence Project 5-100. Overall, the quality of publications of these universities has improved. Collectively, participating universities have tripled their number of publications in reputable journals in the past three years, and researchers have begun to collaborate with each other more frequently. The study was published in the Journal of Informetrics.