Research Clubs and Scientific Seminars

Finance Scientific Club

The club was founded in 2003 at the students’ initiative. The club former head is Z. Kemenova, an instructor at the Department of Finance. Today the club is headed by M. Prokofyev.  The main club goal is to give the students an opportunity to broaden the knowledge of such disciplines as public finance, industrial finance and personal finance.

The club members conduct seminars on a once-in-a-fortnight basis. The club head approves the topics for discussion before the meeting begins.  The students get academic discussion skills and learn how to correctly prove their points during the discussions. The Academy postgraduate students, instructors, and the FRI staff members are invited to come and take part in the discussions.

The club members organize an annual inter-university scientific conference. More than 300 student representatives of various Moscow universities took part in the conference work during a 5-year period.

Student work collections are published at the end of each conference working session.   

 

Professor Belyanov’s Scientific Seminar
 
Professor Belyanov has conducted the scientific seminar for more than a decade. It was organized in 1998. The main seminar goal is to give the undergraduate and postgraduate students an opportunity to learn more about the modern economic theory. It is important for the Russian scholars to examine the developed country-oriented theory in order to be able to adapt it to meet the needs of the economy in transition.    
 
The Seminar Goals and Objectives

•    To give the participants and opportunity to get better knowledge of the theory and to gain  academic discussion skills;  
•    To make the students capable of choosing the best methodology when analyzing the information available in the materials related to the economic theory, applied economics, and the statistical data;   
•    To give the students an opportunity to independently prepare their reports for publications. 

The best students get appropriate recommendations and become postgraduate department students. They also have an opportunity to apply to become the Academy staff instructors in the future.  

The seminar is organized in line with the following principles: 

•    The students take part in the work voluntarily;  
•    Any postgraduate and graduate student can come to take par in the work;  
•    The topics for discussion are chosen by the students; the instructors’ recommendations and seminar participants’ work experience are taken into account when the topics are being chosen;   
•    Each seminar participant is approached on an individual basis;   
•    The work is organized in various forms; it can be a free discussion session, a dispute or a discussion of a report presented;  
•    The students’ individual inclinations towards various types of work are taken into consideration when the meeting is being planned;  
•    The meeting timeframes are convenient for all.  
The summarized work results are published annually in the special collections of works. 

More than 150 students took part in the work during a decade.  


A Seminar in Financial Mathematics  

The seminar was organized for the first time in 1998 at the Department of Higher Mathematics.  Postgraduate, undergraduate students and instructors take part in the work. The discussion topics include the issues that relate to mathematical modeling in economics and finance.

The seminar participants learn about the mathematical methods that are to be used to address the theoretical and practical issues in the fields of finance and economics. They learn to independently analyze the materials published in the field of mathematics and finance and use the mathematical methodology to examine the issues that relate to the applied science. Thus the instructors and the students are engaged in the creative activity and improve their performance efficiency.   

The mathematical methods used in economics differ from those used in technical fields.  The economists cannot make experiments, they have inaccurate and restricted statistical data and the analyses made are the a posteriori analyses.   
     
Among the discussion topics are the following themes:  
•            Financial calculations and financial market models; securities portfolio optimization methodology;
•            Systems approach basics;
•            Introduction to the theory of complexity developed by Goodman and Kemeny;  
•            Introduction to the operations research;   
•            Linear and non-liner programming;   
•            Introduction to scale systems theory;
•            Introduction to the measure theory;
•            Introduction to the theory of probability;
•            Econometric analysis, time rows and cluster analysis;
•            Graph theory.

An orientation session is conducted at the beginning of each year. The most interesting topics for discussion are discussed during the session. The students determine which topics are of interest to them. They prepare their reports on the topics chosen and present them to the seminar participants who discuss the reports presented.  Everybody is welcome to take part in the work. 

The best reports are included into the student collection of works published annually. 

Seven collections of works were published during a decade.
        
The seminar chairperson is N. Serdyukova, Doctor of Economics, Professor at the Department of Higher Mathematics.