News

From April 1 to 3, 2026, the Fourth Robotics Festival took place, with the HSE Faculty of Computer Science acting as the main organiser. The event featured the presentation of the anthropomorphic courier robot Arkus. The humanoid was introduced by the Institute for Robotic Systems, established jointly by HSE University and the EFKO Group of Companies.

HSE researchers have found that the likelihood of quitting smoking rises with increasing financial struggles. While low levels of financial difficulties do not affect smoking behaviour, moderate financial stress can increase the probability of quitting by 13% to 21%. Responses to high financial stress differ by gender: men are almost 1.5 times more likely to give up cigarettes than under normal conditions, whereas no significant effect is observed on women’s decisions to quit smoking. These conclusions are based on data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) for 2000–2023 and have been published in Monitoring of Public Opinion: Economic and Social Changes. 

Victoria Ramos Gonzales, from Bolivia, fell in love with Moscow after visiting the city in 2022. Now, as a student of the ‘Master in International Management’ programme at the HSE Graduate School of Business, she researches management systems with a focus on Latin America. In this interview with the HSE News Service, Victoria talks about choosing to study at HSE University–Moscow, presenting her research to experts at a seminar, and finding the confidence to use Russian in daily life.

In late March 2026, an official meeting took place between a delegation from HSE University and delegations from Vietnam National University, Hanoi (VNU); the Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam; and the Embassy of Vietnam in the Russian Federation. The participants discussed key areas of cooperation that will help strengthen ties not only between the universities, but also between the two countries.

HSE University has hosted a project-based career school organised by the Yandex Cloud Centre for Technologies and Society and the HSE Career Development Centre. The programme was intended for second-to-fourth-year bachelor’s students and first-to-second-year master's students of programmes related to social, technical, and business subjects. The school was aimed at students interested in solving social problems using AI technologies.

Researchers from the HSE Center for Language and Brain and the Mental Health Research Centre have proposed a new method of linguistic analysis that enables the distinction between normal and pathological ageing. Using this approach, they showed that patterns in patients’ word choices during verbal fluency tests allow clinicians to more accurately differentiate clinically significant impairments from subjective memory complaints. Incorporating this type of analysis into clinical practice could improve the accuracy of early dementia diagnosis. The results have been published in Applied Neuropsychology: Adult.

Zhou Jinyu, from China, is a fourth-year student of the Bachelor’s programme ‘Data Science and Business Analytics’ at the HSE University Faculty of Computer Science. On March 5, 2026, Zhou Jinyu delivered the report ‘Exploration of Object-Centric Process Mining Using Object-Centric Sequence Diagrams’ as part of the PAIS Lab seminar. In her interview with the HSE News Service, she spoke on her research topic, how object-centric process mining lets data reflect reality, and her overall experience of studying at HSE University.

Researchers from the HSE Center for Language and Brain used magnetoencephalography to study how the brains of adults and children respond to words during reading. They showed that in children the brain takes longer to process words that are frequently used in everyday speech, while rare words and pseudowords are processed in the same way—slowly and in parts. With age, the system is reorganised: high-frequency words shift to a fast route, whereas new letter combinations are still analysed slowly. The study was published in the journal Psychophysiology.