News

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.

The Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics studies highly complex processes of interaction between molecules and atoms in solids and liquids, the quantum mechanics of these processes, and ultra-thin two-dimensional materials. HSE physicists, together with colleagues from leading academic institutes, investigate the properties of superconductors and topological materials, phenomena at ultra-low temperatures, as well as problems of turbulence and hydrodynamics.

Career prospects in Russia prove to be more important for African students than climate, language barriers, or everyday difficulties. HSE researchers came to this conclusion after analysing survey results from students representing 28 countries across the continent. The key factor influencing their decision is the opportunity to start working while still studying.

On March 19, Academician and Professor Andrey Yaroslavtsev, Head of the Joint Department of Inorganic Chemistry and Material Science with the RAS Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry, celebrated his birthday. To mark the occasion, he spoke with the HSE News Service about protons, membranes, and other areas of his research.

An instructional seminar of the Open Doors International Olympiad has been held at HSE University. Approximately 100 representatives of 24 Russian universities involved in organising the olympiad took part in the event. The seminar focused on updating the participants’ profile maps, organising the work of methodological teams in a digital environment, and ensuring the quality of the methodological content for the olympiad.

An international team including researchers from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science has presented KoWit-24, an annotated dataset of 2,700 Russian-language Kommersant news headlines containing wordplay. The dataset enables an assessment of how artificial intelligence detects and interprets wordplay. Experiments with five large language models show that even advanced systems still make mistakes, and that interpreting wordplay is more challenging for them than detecting it. The results were presented at the RANLP conference; the paper is available on Arxiv.org, and the dataset and the code for reproducing the experiments are available on GitHub.