News

We are proud to announce that in 2020 eight candidates of computer science defended their theses at the Faculty. There have been six candidate defences in 2019. Prior to 2018, there were only degrees of candidate and doctor of technical or physical-mathematical sciences in Russia. Degrees in computer science have become possible due to HSE University's ability to grant its own degrees.

Upon successfully defending his dissertation before HSE Dissertation Council in Computer Science, Pavel Dvurechensky became the first Doctor of Computer Science in Russia. This was possible thanks to the fact that, starting in 2018, HSE University received the right to award its own academic degrees.

Maria Poptsova, head of the International Laboratory of Bioinformatics and associate professor of the Big Data and Information Retrieval School, spoke at the AI Journey 2020 conference on artificial intelligence with a presentation “Deep Learning in Genomics”.

Coursera has listed the most popular courses in 2020 among users from Russia. ‘Basics of Programming in Python’ by HSE Unviersity is among the top five.

It is a custom to tally up the year's results in December. We would like to tell you the results of the scientific life at the Faculty of Computer Science in 2020. You can read about the first half of the year in our previous digest. While this was not a year on which we shall look back with undiluted pleasure, but we still managed to achieve important results, adapted to changing circumstances, and made our best.

HSE scientists have proposed a way to improve the accuracy of finding Z-DNA, or DNA regions that are twisted to the left instead of to the right. To do this, they used neural networks and a dataset of more than 30,000 experiments conducted by different laboratories around the world. Details of the study are published in Scientific Reports.

This year’s HSE competition for the creation of international laboratories which considered proposals for the period of January 1, 2021 – December 21, 2023, was conducted from June 15 to December 15, 2020.

Mikhail Guschin, Research Fellow at the HSE University Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis of the Faculty of Computer Science, was appointed coordinator of the machine learning and statistics working group in the LHCb Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). He will be the only representative of a Russian University among the coordinators for the experiment’s working groups.

In 2020, almost every field of the Faculty's work changed, but international cooperation suffered the most: around the world schools were cancelled, conferences took place online, internships were conducted remotely. Nevertheless, in 2020, twenty-two students of the Faculty of Computer Science were able to go to the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Finland, Turkey, Germany, Denmark, UK, and Australia under the aegis of mobility programmes.

The 2020 eSTARS conference, organized by HSE University in partnership with the global educational platform Coursera, has commenced. For the first time in its history, the event is being held entirely online. At the plenary session and the first panel session, representatives of the world's leading universities, their associations, and educational platforms spoke about the role of digitalization in the development of higher education, the impact of the pandemic on education, and new approaches to how teachers and students can interact.