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On January 30, Dr. Arnis Sauka, Head of the Centre for Sustainable Business at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (Latvia), presented the findings of a Shadow Economy Index study at a research seminar at the HSE School of Sociology and Centre for Labour Market Studies. In an interview for HSE News Service, Dr. Sauka discussed the idea behind the study, its methodology, and results.

The year 2019 ended with an important event: Russia approved its first national standards for artificial intelligence. Starting in September 2020, AI-based smart systems will need to comply with these new regulations. It is far more difficult, however, to regulate people's attitudes towards such systems. People tend to fear and idolise AI, but should they really? Henry Penikas, Assistant Professor of the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences, discusses why they probably shouldn't and how algorithms can be fooled.

Researchers from HSE University, Skoltech and the University of Toronto analyzed data from 190 fMRI studies and found out that food, sex and money implicate similar brain regions whereas different types of reward favor the left and right hemispheres differently. The paper is to be published in Brain Imaging and Behavior. 

This prize is annually awarded to doctoral students, researchers and professionals from Moscow-based institutions, as well as people with Candidate or Doctor of Sciences degrees. Researchers from HSE University won competition for the third year in a row and will be recognized at ceremony slated to take place on February 7 at the Kremlin Palace.

Only a few Russian companies regularly introduce innovation in products and services. The reason why many others fail to do so may have something to do with how they treat their employees’ innovative ideas, according to HSE sociologists.

At the close of 2019, HSE University once again ranked first among Russian organizations in the RePEc/IDEAS (Research Papers in Economics) world ranking and advanced to a record-breaking 129^th place. The ranking evaluates economic, academic, and research institutions based on their publication activity in economics.

Alexandr Voronovici,a second year postdoctoral research fellow at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, shared his experience of teaching transnational perspective on Soviet history to HSE students.

HSE researches have shown that the 2010 happiness level of citizens from Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and other Arab countries could provide a much more accurate forecast of the Arab Spring events than purely economic indices, such as GDP per capita and unemployment rate.

In early December 2019, HSE University welcomed Onur Güntürkün from Ruhr-University Bochum, a leading expert in studies of thinking, to deliver a lecture entitled ‘Cognition without a Cortex.’ Among other things, Onur Güntürkün is known for demonstrating that magpies pass the mirror test, i.e., recognize themselves in a mirror. IQ.HSE attended Prof. Güntürkün’ lecture, which was organized with the support of the German Research Foundation, DFG, and asked him several questions about the problem of thinking, and why cleaner fish turned out to be ‘smarter’ than octopi.

Ekaterina Melianova and Artyom Volgin, second-year students of the Master’s programme ‘Applied Statistics with Network Analysis’, took second place in an international data analysis competition. Using a Kaggle survey of 19,717 respondents from 171 countries, they analyzed the community of PhD degree holders in Data Science.