News

Every year, HSE University students and recent graduates vote for their Best Teachers. Among the winners of this year’s vote was Martin Beisswenger, Assistant Professor at the School of History at the HSE University Faculty of Humanities. In the latest in our series of interviews with this year’s Best Teachers, we spoke to Martin about the significance of winning the competition, building a balanced curriculum, and how to respond to criticism.

HSE staff members are participating in the ‘Russian Cultural Heritage: Intellectual Analysis and Thematic Modeling of the Corpus of Handwritten Texts’ project. This is aimed at developing a methodology for the automated analysis of manuscripts, eliminating the need for manual processing. HSE News Service spoke to Ekaterina Boltunova, project manager, Professor, Head of the Laboratory 'Russia’s Regions in Historical Perspective' at HSE Faculty of Humanities.

Dmitry Perkov, a student on the ‘Master of Finance’ online programme, has developed his career from sales representative to regional manager in multinational corporations. He told HSE News Service how studying helped him to take a fresh look at his regular job and provided him with tools for managing his own investment portfolio.

Scholars from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience have translated the Emotional Contagion Scale into Russian and validated it on Russian-speaking participants. It was the first study of how people unconsciously ‘catch’ other people’s emotions using a Russian sample. The results of the survey, which involved more than 500 respondents, demonstrate that women are more inclined to imitate emotions of others than men. The study was published inFrontiers in Psychology. 

After getting his Master’s degree in Computer Science in Rome, Julio Carrasquel decided not to pursue a corporate career in IT, but to move to Moscow to get a PhD at HSE University. As a result, he received a scholarship on the Advanced Doctoral Programme, successfully defended his thesis, and was named one of the university’s Best Teachers. Julio talked with the HSE News Service about his path in academia and life in Russia.

HSE researchers have proposed a new neural network method for recognising emotions and people's engagement. The algorithms are based on the analysis of video images of faces and significantly outperform existing single models. The developed models are suitable for low-performance equipment, including mobile devices. The results can be implemented into video conferencing tools and online learning systems to analyse the engagement and emotions of participants. The results of the study were published in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

Researchers from HSE University and the Pushkin Institute have demonstrated that pairwise comparisons work better than rating scales for measuring motivation. The reason is that many people cannot rank their motives in a hierarchical fashion. The study findings are published in Frontiers in Psychology.

On September 21, the HSE ART GALLERY of the HSE Art and Design School opened the exhibition ‘Screen Arts. Roll call’. Pierre-Christian Brochet, curator of the programme in Contemporary Art and the HSE Art Unit, delivered a welcoming speech. Students, famous contemporary artists and pioneers of Russian video art took part in the event.