News

On December 3–5, 2026, HSE University in Moscow will host ‘Comorbid Field 3.0: Social Well-Being, Health, and Medicine in Multiple Contexts,’ an interdisciplinary scientific conference with international participation organised by the Centre for Comparative Research on Social Well-Being at the HSE University Faculty of Social Sciences together with the HSE University–St Petersburg School of Arts and Humanities, the Institute for Interdisciplinary Health Research at the European University at St Petersburg, and Sechenov University. Applications for participation are open until October 4.

Researchers at the HSE Centre for Language and Brain have presented RusLan-M, an open multimedia corpus that makes it possible to trace the development of early child speech in Russian from first words to the emergence of complex grammatical constructions. The database contains around 41 hours of video recordings and more than 35,000 child utterances. The new resource will help researchers study more precisely how children acquire Russian and, in the longer term, develop more reliable tools for assessing speech development. The study has been published in Language Resources and Evaluation.

The HSE FCS AI and Digital Science Institute and Sber have introduced a new architecture for recommendation systems that combines two classes of models, enabling algorithms to better predict users’ interests and needs. A preprint of the paper has been published on arxiv.org and presented at Urban ML.

Jean-François Mehdi Jabir, a Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Stochastic Analysis and Its Applications originally from France, has been working at HSE University since 2017. He was drawn to HSE by the opportunity to conduct joint research with leading Russian and international scientists, the freedom of academic discussion, and the openness of the university. Jean-François shared his thoughts on HSE University and Moscow in general with the HSE News Service.

Having a sweet tooth may be linked not only to eating habits but also to the way people make decisions. Researchers at HSE University have found that people with a preference for sweet foods tend to behave more impulsively—not because they want immediate rewards, but because they are less willing to tolerate uncertainty. These findings may help improve treatments for addiction. The study findings have been published in Frontiers in Psychology.

From July 13 to 16, 2026, the Faculty of Computer Science hosted the Russian–Sino Research Seminar on Machine Learning Applications, organised by the HSE Laboratory for Cloud and Mobile Technologies in partnership with the Harbin Institute of Technology (China). A delegation comprising seven students and three university representatives travelled to Moscow to take part in an intensive four-day programme.

Researchers from HSE University and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have developed a set of simple analytical methods for calculating the properties of heavy ions in helium under the influence of a strong electric field. The new approach speeds up calculations of ion mobility and ion–molecule reaction rates by thousands of times while maintaining sufficient accuracy for plasma jet modelling. The findings have been published in the journal Physica Scripta.

Economists from HSE University, together with colleagues from international universities, have analysed stock market movements over almost a century and proposed an investment strategy that could have delivered returns nearly twice as high as the market average. Their research suggests following a momentum strategy during periods of sustained market growth and switching to a value strategy after prolonged market declines. The study has been published in the Journal of Banking and Finance.

Researchers at HSE University have examined how communication difficulties in children with autism are related to brain function. The findings show that not only language networks but also attention networks play an important role. The weaker the connections involved in maintaining focus and switching attention, the more pronounced communication difficulties were. The study has been published in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Why do some people voluntarily follow new rules while others ignore them? Researchers at HSE University have found that the answer lies not so much in people's willingness to cooperate, as previously believed, but in their ability to empathise with others. Empathy proved to be the strongest predictor of whether people chose to wear face masks voluntarily during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings have been published in Frontiers.