News

Petroleum for equine care, wood oil for lighting, sandalwood for Easter celebrations, and lemons and olives for entertaining unexpected guests. Russian monasteries often used these and other eastern goods in the period leading up to and during the reign of Peter the Great. Analysing their account books leads to a revision of the traditional assumptions about the primary consumers of oriental goods in Russia. These consumers, in addition to the royal and aristocratic circles, included monastery estates, as discussed in the paper ‘“Three altyns worth of petroleum…”: Oriental goods in Russia at the second half of the 17th and early 18th century’ by historian Arthur Mustafin of HSE University. Based on his paper, IQ.HSE explores the types of goods that were shipped from the East to Russia in the latter half of the 17th to the early 18th century, including the routes and purposes of these shipments.

Alexandra Mamlina teaches HSE University students Italian, defends her dissertation on the Visconti of Milan, and dreams of writing an art history book about northern Italy. In an interview with the HSE Young Scientists project, she shared how Italian became part of her life, thoughts about the giants on the facade of the Duomo, and the fact that she could have been born on a lake, but instead was born on the Ob Sea.

The 21^st cohort of the MBA Programme in Investment Management has started training at the HSE Banking Institute. The number of students this year was about 40 people. Students will gain knowledge and experience from practicing teachers, practice-oriented seminars, analyses of real cases, and joint projects with the country's leading banks and companies.

HSE University in St Petersburg and University of Technology Malaysia (UTM) have launched a mirror lab in social entrepreneurship. The agreement was signed in Kuala Lumpur on November 9 during a meeting of the Joint Russian-Malaysian Commission on Economic, Scientific, Technical and Cultural Cooperation. The document was signed by Anna Tyshetskaya, Director of HSE University-St Petersburg, and Rosli Illias, UTM Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation.

At the beginning of November, HSE University’s Cultural Centre hosted HSE Unity Fest, a large-scale festival organised by HSE University’s Chamber of Nationalities. The event was attended by 33 national clubs of the university, whose representatives told festival guests about the traditions of different nations.

An international collaboration including researchers from the HSE Faculty of Computer Science has proposed a new approach to designing detectors used for experiments in elementary particle physics. The novel approach, which involves differentiable programming and deep neural networks, will optimise the instruments’ performance and enhance the scientific value of the experimental results.

On November 7, a representative office of HSE University opened in Indonesia. It is a new educational hub for students from the Asia-Pacific (APAC) who are planning to study in Russia, as well as for other Russian universities looking to establish ties with Indonesia. The representative office is based at Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology (ITS) in the city of Surabaya. Its operations are supervised by the HSE University campus in St Petersburg.

For HSE Preparatory Year students, the Russian Speaking Club is a way to improve their language proficiency in a relaxed atmosphere. At this year’s first such event, they discussed online communications and social media. Michael Dzodzoe from Ghana and Leen Sabbagh from Syria shared their impressions with the HSE News Service.