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Widespread internet access, low-cost mobile communications, convenient online services and banking applications make everyday life more comfortable, access to resources more equal, and society more equitable. Russians’ attitude towards the expansion of technologies such as AI was debated during an expert discussion organised by the HSE University Centre for Social Research and Technological Innovation and the St Petersburg Politics Foundation.

At the end of April, the HSE Faculty of Computer Science organised its first robotics festival. SBER was a partner of the event, which took place in the atrium of the HSE building on Pokrovsky Bulvar. Yandex and the National Association of Robotics Market Participants were the event's co-organisers. The guests attended lectures from industry experts and interacted with robots on interactive platforms.

At the end of April, HSE University hosted a Career Marathon in both offline and online formats. Representatives from 42 companies and several thousand students from HSE and many other universities took part in the event. For two days, the marathon participants attended poster sessions in the Pokrovka atrium, along with master classes from event partners, an interactive photo zone, and prize and merchandise draws, as well as experiencing an open dialogue with experts, and express interviews for current vacancies and internships.

HSE University plans to significantly expand its cooperation with Chinese universities and schools, creating new cooperation programmes and developing existing ones. This includes plans to attract potential candidates to take part in HSE University olympiads, increase the number of Chinese students at the university, and create joint educational programmes.

The 8^th Russian Comics Conference ‘The World of Comics’, organised by the HSE Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, took place online in March 2023. Over the two days of the conference, 44 comics researchers from Russia, France, China, and Malaysia presented their papers on comics history, narratives, visuals, and animation.

In honour of HSE University’s 30^th anniversary in November 2022, the RT television channel made a documentary film called 2052: See the Future. The film is dedicated to the university’s research achievements and how they will change the world in the decades to come. The film was released this year in English and Arabic. The first festival screening of 2052: See the Future took place as part of the 7^th Gagarin.doc International Festival of Cinema, Science and Contemporary Art.

HSE researchers, in collaboration with their colleagues from Skoltech and the Central Research Institute for Epidemiology, have uncovered the mechanisms behind the emergence of new and dangerous coronavirus variants, such as Alpha, Delta, Omicron, and others. They have discovered that the likelihood of a substitution occurring at a specific site of the SARS-CoV-2 genome is dependent on concordant substitutions occurring at other sites. This explains why new and more contagious variants of the virus can emerge unexpectedly and differ significantly from those that were previously circulating. The study’s findings have been published in eLife.

Researchers at the HSE Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience have discovered that analysing the electrical activity in the brains of a small group of people and studying their visual attention makes it possible to predict the impact of an online advertising campaign on a much larger group of 300,000 consumers. The paper has been published in Brain Sciences.