HSE — Nizhny Novgorod

Would you like to know whether a speaker’s trembling voice or an accidental gesture can give them away? At HSE University in Nizhny Novgorod, researchers are developing an algorithm that analyses speech, facial expressions, and gestures, and determines whether information is truthful with 92% accuracy. The project has applications ranging from forensic examination and bank recruitment to fundamental research. Anna Khomenko, head of the research group and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Language and Brain at the HSE Faculty of Humanities in Nizhny Novgorod, explains how students and researchers are working together to create a corpus of video recordings, train a classifier, and prepare to introduce computer vision technology.

In the year marking the 30th anniversary of HSE University's campus in Nizhny Novgorod, a new academic building for the Art and Design School has opened in the historic House of K. G. Ivanov, an early 20th-century architectural landmark located on Nizhny Novgorod’s main pedestrian street. The opening ceremony, attended by representatives of the Nizhny Novgorod Region government, marked an important milestone in the development of design education in the region.

Registration has opened for the new season of the National Technology Olympiad (NTO), Russia’s largest team-based engineering competition. Applications are open to students in Years 5–11, as well as college and university students. Every year, the olympiad brings together hundreds of thousands of young people from across Russia and a number of other countries, offering them the opportunity to explore cutting-edge engineering fields. Every NTO participant can choose profiles that match their interests and try their hand at solving real-world problems.

Timur Khusyainov, Deputy Dean of theFaculty of Humanities atHSE University–Nizhny Novgorod, took part in two international conferences—the XVI World Congress of Rural Sociology in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and the 36th Annual Conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (DH2026) in Daejeon, South Korea. On his way to the conferences, the researcher also visited several other places, where he presented the experience of the Pochtovoe educational project.

Mathematicians at HSE University–Nizhny Novgorod, in collaboration with colleagues from Tongji University in Shanghai, are investigating the fundamental causes of structural stability in systems and the mechanisms underlying its disruption. In this interview with the HSE News Service, Prof. Olga Pochinka, Head of the International Laboratory of Dynamical Systems and Applications at HSE University–Nizhny Novgorod and leader of the project ‘Qualitative Theory of Systems of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations,’ discusses the project, which is being implemented as part of HSE University's International Academic Cooperation programme.

Scientists from HSE University–Nizhny Novgorod and the Institute of Physics Belgrade, Serbia, are jointly exploring the application of machine learning techniques and neural networks to the study of nonlinear dynamics. Natalya Stankevich, Leading Research Fellow at the Laboratory of Topological Methods in Dynamics of the Faculty of Informatics, Mathematics, and Computer Science at HSE University–Nizhny Novgorod, spoke to the HSE News Service about this international project.