A team of researchers from Russia and Israel applied a new algorithm to classify the severity of autistic personality traits by studying subjects’ brain activity. The article ‘Brief Report: Classification of Autistic Traits According to Brain Activity Recoded by fNIRS Using ε-Complexity Coefficients’ is published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
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The annual awards ceremony of the Student Research Paper Competition (NIRS) was held on February 8, Russian Science Day. This year, 165 people received awards, including not only HSE students but also contestants from Saint Petersburg State University, Moscow State University, Far Eastern Federal University, Mount Holyoke College (USA), and other universities. Another 160 participants became laureates of the competition, with 1,924 papers submitted in total.
Researchers from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience have proposed a new method to process magnetoencephalography (MEG) data, which helps find cortical activation areas with higher precision. The method can be used in both basic research and clinical practice to diagnose a wide range of neurological disorders and to prepare patients for brain surgery. The paper describing the algorithm was published in the journal NeuroImage.
Today, neuroscience and robotics are developing hand in hand. Mikhail Lebedev, Academic Supervisor at HSE University’s Centre for Bioelectric Interfaces, spoke about how studying the brain inspires the development of robots.
Biologists and mathematicians from HSE University, Skoltech and the RAS Kharkevich Institute have studied the spread of COVID-19 in Russia. The main part of the study was completed in late June, but until October, the team was working with data following the reviewers’ recommendations. The paper was published on January 28, 2021 in the journal Nature Communications. MIEM students spoke about their contribution to the research.
Russian enterprises have limited opportunities to modernise their technological capabilities independently. Their technological portfolios reveal a high dependence on imported solutions and a limited use of their own developments, HSE researchers discovered.
Researchers trying to compare economic data of the USSR and capitalist countries face questions of the comprehensiveness, accessibility, and reliability of data on Soviet economic production and growth. At an online seminar hosted by the HSE University International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and its Consequences, Assistant Professor Ilya Voskoboynikov (Faculty of Economic Sciences, HSE University) presented an overview of available approaches to studying the absolute size of the Soviet economy and its growth rates.
More than a hundred countries have already declared the achievement of ‘zero emissions with the exception of absorption’ to be their primary goal in the fight against climate change. For Russia, whose primary export is fossil fuels, the global rejection of hydrocarbons poses great risks. Experts discussed the issue at the research seminar, ‘Decarbonization as a Global Trend: Changing the Economic Landscape and Its Importance for Companies’, which was jointly organized by HSE University and the Association of European Businesses.
Countries with reserve currencies, sufficient fiscal capacity to implement soft fiscal policies, and access to global capital markets have the best chance of recovering from the coronavirus crisis. The rest may need external assistance. These are the conclusions drawn by Alexei Kireyev, leading IMF economist and visiting professor at HSE University’s School of World Economy.
The idea for the project, which studies the crisis experience, was born at HSE University’s Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs last spring, when it became clear that the pandemic and lockdown had given rise to a new systemic crisis, based on numerous contradictions that have accumulated in the world over the past decades. The results of the scientific Lessons from the Crises of the Past project have been presented to the portal's news service by Igor Makarov, Head of HSE University’s School of World Economy.