Research & Expertise news at HSE University

After studying the brain scans of 13 Russian cosmonauts who participated in space missions to the ISS from 2014 to 2020, scientists discovered that prolonged exposure to microgravity had an impact on the connectivity of the brain structures responsible for adapting to unfamiliar conditions. The study revealed that these connections may not always return to their original state after the flight. The paper has been published in Communications Biology.

Researchers at HSE University in Perm have used electroencephalography (EEG) to determine that consumers are willing to pay 10% more for chocolate when they know it to be a premium product. On the other hand, if consumers are aware that a chocolate product is inexpensive, their willingness to pay decreases by 13%. On average, men are willing to pay 8.8 monetary units more for chocolate than women, and men's willingness to pay decreases by 0.3 monetary units with each additional year of age. The study has been published in Food Quality and Preference.

Neural network generative models have achieved impressive results in recent years, but researchers are still working on increasing their efficiency. Researchers from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science and AIRI have managed to optimize the finetuning of the StyleGAN2 neural network, which creates realistic images, to new domains, reducing the number of trained parameters by four orders of magnitude. At the same time, the quality of the obtained images remained high. The results of this work were presented at the NeurIPS 2022 conference.

Using a multidimensional approach, sociologists from HSE University have identified some vulnerable categories of the population that have rarely been the focus of research on poverty. According to their calculations, pensioners and people with disabilities also fall into the ‘poor’ category. The study was published in the Russian Journal of Economics.

Researchers at the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences Laboratory for Wealth Measurement analysed income and cost of living data at the sub-regional level in Russia (municipalities) and in the US (counties). The study reveals that territorial differences in the cost of living are more pronounced in Russia compared to the United States. However, the distribution of overall income across settlements of varying sizes is quite comparable in both countries. The article has been published in the HSE Economic Journal.

An international team including HSE researchers has conducted the largest ever cross-cultural study of appearance-enhancing behaviours. They have found that people worldwide spend an average of four hours a day on enhancing their beauty. Caring for one's appearance does not depend on gender, and older people worry as much about looking their best as the young do. The strongest predictor of attractiveness-enhancing behaviours appears to be social media usage. The study findings have been published in Evolution and Human Behaviour.

Sergey Samsonov could have become a historian or worked in a hedge fund, but he devoted himself to mathematics. In this interview with the HSE Young Scientists project, he explained why he chose research in statistics and machine learning and how to generate a million images of cats.

Between March 27 and May 17, applications are open for the Mirror Lab Project Competition. As part of the new applications campaign, the HSE University bulletin (Okna Rosta) is publishing a series of interviews with the winners of last year's competition. In this issue, Natalia Kryzhanovskaya and Maxim Solodovnik speak about nano- and quantum technologies, as well as cooperation between HSE and Southern Federal University (SFedU).