Research & Expertise news at HSE University

Researchers from HSE University studied the perception of social robots (robots that are able to communicate with people and assist them with various needs) in everyday situations. They studied the perception of such factors as the robots’ appearance, speech, interaction situations, as well as the respondents’ characteristics. The scholars found that androids are more desirable in various situations than humanoids (robots that only vaguely resemble humans).

HSE University researchers together with colleagues from Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the University of Pennsylvania examined the determinants of episodic volunteer satisfaction and its impact on the motivation to continue volunteering.

Academics’ work week became even longer during the pandemic. This is true of researchers from different countries, independently of their gender and specialisation, an international research team with HSE University participation found. Their working time during the pandemic was 51 hours compared to the usual 40. The increased number of working hours per week seems to have become part of the new academic norm. The results of the study were published in the Plos One journal.

What does Kaliningrad Oblast, an exclave Russian territory, have in common with Perm Krai, a region in the Urals? How do researchers use digital humanities methods to study migration? Sergei Kornienko, Leading Research Fellow at the Group for Historical Research (HSE University-Perm), heads the Mirror Lab project ‘Migration as a factor of social transformation of Soviet regions during the post-war reconstruction period: an analysis through digital humanities’. In this interview for The HSE LooK, he talks about this collaboration.

Is there a system of values that is common to the whole population of Russia? Do values differ across generations? Is it possible to carry out research among refugees? HSE University researchers joined forces with their peers from Kuban State Technological University to study values and intercultural relations across Russian regions as part of a Mirror Labs project. The HSE LooK talked about this cooperation to Nadezhda Lebedeva, Director of the HSE Centre for Sociocultural Research, who heads up the Mirror Lab project, and project participant Victoria Galyapina, Leading Research Fellow at the same Centre.

Harry Potter becomes a scientist, 'Hermione has changed a lot over the summer', and the Bennet sisters from Pride and Prejudice are fighting against zombies. A game, an unwillingness to part with one’s favourite characters, an attempt to correct the author's 'mistakes' — all of this is fanfiction. Fan creations, on one hand, draw on cultural canons, and on the other hand, challenge them and offer an alternative vision. High art can no longer ignore fan practices — both as its own mirror reflections and as a space for new opportunities. A paper by HSE researcher Ksenia Romanenko helps us delve deeper into the culture of fanfiction and examine its relationship to the cultural canon.

The Human Capital Interdisciplinary Research Centre (HCIRC) is a world-class research centre comprising a consortium of HSE University, RANEPA, MGIMO University, and the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). Its work was highly rated by the RAS in 2021. Lilia Ovcharova, HSE University Vice Rector and initiator of the centre’s creation, talked to the HSE News Service about integration in international studies on active ageing, creating a database on development trends in human potential, studying the effects of digitalisation, and the centre’s priority activities for the future.

In their paper published in Science in 2021, a DeepMind team showed how neural networks can be used to describe electron interactions in chemical systems more accurately than existing methods. A team of researchers from Skoltech, the Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry, HSE University, Yandex, and Kyungpook National University show in their comment in Science that DeepMind AI’s ability to generalise the behaviour of such systems does not follow from the published results and requires revisiting, the Skoltech website says.