Research & Expertise

HSE University-St Petersburg opened a representative office of the Satellite Laboratory on Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Campinas in Brazil. The platform is going to unite research and educational projects in the spheres of sustainable development, communications and social innovations.

An international team of researchers, including physicists from HSE MIEM, has demonstrated that nonmagnetic impurities can help more accurately reveal Majorana zero modes—quantum states considered promising building blocks for quantum computing. The researchers found that these impurities shift the energy levels that typically obscure the Majorana signal, while leaving the mode itself largely unaffected, thereby making its spectral peak more distinct. The study has been published in Research.

Researchers from the AI and Digital Science Institute at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science have developed a program capable of analysing regions of the human genome that were previously inaccessible for accurate interpretation in genetic testing. The program adapts large generative AI (GenAI) models for cardiogenetics to predict how specific mutations affect the function of individual genes.

Diaries and letters are an invaluable resource for humanities scholars. But what can be done when the text is impossible to read? At the HSE Faculty of Humanities, this challenge has been translated into the language of mathematics: a team of philologists, historians, and machine learning specialists has created an information system that not only recognises illegible handwriting but also helps analyse archival content.

Researchers at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science benchmarked more than 200,000 model configurations for predicting financial asset prices and realised volatility, showing that performance can be improved by filtering out noise at specific frequencies in advance. This technique increased accuracy in 65% of cases. The authors also developed their own algorithm, which achieves accuracy comparable to that of the best models while requiring less computational power. The study has been published in Applied Soft Computing.

On April 20–21, the HSE School of Foreign Languages held the V International Scientific and Practical Conference ‘Languages. Education. Development’ (HSE LED). It was organised in an online format and dedicated to current trends in the development of modern knowledge in linguistics and pedagogy. Over two days, about 1,700 participants (including more than 220 speakers) took part in the event— 40% more than in the previous academic year.

A team of scientists at HSE FCS and Yandex Research has proposed a method that reduces computational costs and accelerates text-to-image generation in diffusion models without compromising quality. These models currently set the standard for text-to-image generation, but their use is limited by high computational loads, the company said in a statement.

The HSE University International Laboratory for Mirror Symmetry and Automorphic Forms and the Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (BIMSA) held a joint online conference on mathematical physics. The results of the laboratory research presented at the event will be published in leading academic journals.

The HSE Faculty of Urban and Regional Development acted as a partner in organising the first International Transport and Logistics Forum, held in St Petersburg in early April and bringing together more than 6,000 participants from 82 countries. With the faculty’s support, a key session was held entitled ‘A Driverless Future: How Driverless Transport is Changing the Concept of Spatial Organisation from the City to the State’ and moderated by Russian Minister of Transport Andrei Nikitin.

How can states maintain governability and stability in a world where established rules are rapidly losing their force? Prof. Ali Farazmand of Florida Atlantic University answered this question in a presentation delivered at the XXVI April International Academic Conference named after Evgeny Yasin. The scholar proposed examining the transformation of the global order through the lens of two ‘mega-shifts’—from the rise of global corporate capitalism to the emerging multipolarity of today—and demonstrated why this transition between eras requires fundamentally new approaches to governance.