In summer 2026, the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) took several steps towards establishing closer ties with leading Chinese universities. The Faculty signed a landmark memorandum with one of China’s top technical universities and also began talks with Peking University. In addition, the International Laboratory for Digital Transformation in Public Administration, affiliated with FSS, held an international summer school in Moscow with the participation of Chinese colleagues.

Vincent Fardeau, Associate Professor at HSE ICEF, has reached a major career milestone: he recently published his paper ‘Asymmetric Thin Markets’ in the Journal of Financial Economics, successfully passed his major academic review, and received tenure. In this interview, Vincent discusses the story behind the paper, explains the concept of asymmetric thin markets, and shares his advice for young scholars aiming to publish in top-tier journals.

A researcher at HSE University analysed data on 1,539 doctoral students from 161 Russian universities to identify which features of a thesis topic are associated with academic success and engagement. The most important factor was found to be personal interest in the research topic, which was associated with almost all key aspects of doctoral programme experience—from engaging with the academic supervisor to research activity and confidence about successfully defending the thesis. The findings have been published in Higher Education.

A new academic year is the right time to start planning one’s international projects and publications. The HSE Academic Writing Centre invites researchers, faculty members, and postgraduate students to the AWC Welcome Day on September 23–24. This is a traditional event to start the year where the participants can get to know the AWC team and find out more about its programme for the autumn semester.

Having a good defence attorney in criminal proceedings can largely determine whether a defendant retains their freedom, health and good name. Researchers at HSE University propose a method for predicting an attorney’s performance based on the outcomes of their previous cases. The methodology takes into account the severity of the charges, the complexity of the cases, and the most likely outcome, drawing on judicial statistics.

A delegation of scientists from Hanoi visited the HSE Faculty of Computer Science and then took part in a Russian-Vietnamese conference in St Petersburg. The events were part of the three-year project ‘Flexibility and Computational Methods.’ Over the course of the project, the researchers have prepared joint publications and obtained new mathematical results.

Illustrations can help remember specific actions but do not always make abstract ideas easier to learn. Researchers from HSE University and Humboldt University compared how people learn from texts with different levels of abstractness. They found that participants remembered illustrations better and performed better on related tasks after reading a multimedia text about yoga asanas than after reading an abstract text about the Nash equilibrium. The findings could help improve the selection of illustrations for educational and informational materials. The study has been published in Learning and Instruction.

HSE University has joined the international BESIII (Beijing Spectrometer III) collaboration in high-energy physics. This marks the first practical outcome of the memorandum of cooperation signed in 2025 between HSE University and the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, China.

Researchers from HSE University presented a study at the international ChinaMM 2026 conference on how video transmission distortions affect the performance of neural networks. The authors proposed a new approach to testing the robustness of such models under conditions that closely resemble the real-world use of video services.