Research & Expertise news at HSE University

Redundancy and crisis — these are the words higher education experts Philip G. Altbach and Hans de Wit use to describe the situation in the global market of academic publications. It has been largely caused by external factors, such as the rise of university rankings that focus on the number of research and papers and pressure by publishers. But universities’ behavior is also an explanation for the crisis. Many of them try to imitate research universities and produce lots of publications of widely varying quality, the experts said in their paper in the HSE journal International Higher Education.

On April 2, Sonia Arribas, Senior Lecturer at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, will give a talk as part of the seminar ‘West and East: Universalism of Culture’ at the HSE International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue. In her talk, Sonia Arribas will map out the various functions of the symbol of ‘bread’ in Piotr Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.

While much of the focus on politics and global affairs over the past several decades has been on democratization, the most striking thing about this period has been the survival and spread of authoritarian regimes, argues Graeme Gill, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. Professor Gill is one of the presenters at the upcoming XX April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development, scheduled this year for April 9-12 at the Higher School of Economics.

In October 2015, England introduced a charge for single-use plastic bags in supermarkets. The charge was largely supported by the population, led to substantial reduction in plastic bag use, and catalyzed a wider support for similar measures aimed at tackling plastic waste.

Prof. Dr Thomas Dohmen from the Institute for Applied Microeconomics, University of Bonn, Germany is to deliver an honorary lecture at the upcoming April Academic Conference at HSE University April 9 – 12. HSE News Service spoke with Dr. Dohmen about his work on the Global Preferences Survey (GPS), an international survey of epic proportions that he helped develop and analyze in order to learn whether individuals differ in terms of economic preferences by country, and more.

Legally, the 1917 revolution solved the gender issue in the Russian academic community. The doors to the profession opened for women, but a ‘glass ceiling’ remained. Ekaterina Streltsova and Evgenia Dolgova studied who it affected and why. This study is the first to present a socio-demographic analysis of the female academic community in Moscow and Leningrad during the early Soviet era.

Scholars from HSE University have developed an algorithm that detects emotions in a group of people on a low-quality video. The solution provides a final decision in just one hundredth of a second, which is faster than any other existing algorithms with similar accuracy. The results have been described in the paper ‘Emotion Recognition of a Group of People in Video Analytics Using Deep Off-the-Shelf Image Embeddings.’

During the XX April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development, scheduled this year for April 9-12 at the Higher School of Economics, Dr David Garcia of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna, Austria will present a report entitled ‘The digital traces of collective emotion’ at a session on ‘The Wellbeing of Children and Youth in the Digital Age.’ Ahead of the conference, Dr Garcia spoke with the HSE News Service about his conference presentation, his research, and plans for ongoing collaboration with HSE colleagues.