Blog

This graph shows the directedness of each city based on its road network acquired from OpenStreetMap using OSMNx.

Using Budapest Open Data to visualize the elevation lines of Budapest from the plain of Pest on the hills of Buda.

Here, I used a detailed Synthetic-aperture radar at a resolution of 125m to visualize the surface morphology of Antarctica.

My 2023 black-and-white map shows the elevation lines of Italy in a Ridge-map layout.

In this mini project, I used Sentinel satellite images to create an animation on the changes in Upsala Glacier, Argentina, for several years.

In this visual, I created actual heatmaps showing global temperature values using World Climate data:

In this article, I explore the UN Comtrade international trade database by focusing on the “Chocolate and other food preparations containing cocoa” trade category.

This map shows the road network of North America based on the Natural Earth data set, visualising 49,183 road segments and showing very neatly how the continent’s morphology and population density changes

One map shows almost 200k line polygons belonging to rivers attributed with a couple of parameters, such as their major river basin or the Strahler stream order of each arc.

This world map shows each country as a polygon based on Natural Earth data, where each country is coloured based on its distance from the equator.

Visualizing the road network of Budapest using OpenStreetMap and the OSMNx package.

The first map I created for the 2023 #30DayMapChallenge covers NASA’s Open Data Portal’s Meteorite Landing data.

I recently came across with an exciting dataset titled Roman Road Network (version 2008) on Harvard’s Dataverse: the historical road networks of the Roman Empire in a perfect GIS format! Additionally, I have been working on a project about public transport networks and how to identify the hotspots and bottlenecks of such a network network science.

In this article, I show a quick and easy-to-use methodology that is capable of identifying hot spots for a given interest based on Point of interest (POI) collected from OpenStreeetMap (OSM) using the DBSCAN algorithm of sklearn. First, I will collect the raw data of POIs belonging to a couple of categories that I found on ChatGPT, and I assumed they are characteristic of the sometimes-called hyp-lifestyle (e.g., cafes, bars, marketplaces, yoga studios); after converting that data into a handy GeoDataFrame, I do the geospatial clustering, and finally, evaluate the results based on how well the different urban functionalities mix in each cluster.

In this piece, I combine earlier work on urban accessibility or walkability with open-source data on the location of public defibrillator devices. Additionally, I incorporate global population data and Uber’s H3 grid system to estimate the share of the population within reasonable reach to any device within Budapest and Vienna.

The Earth is more or less a sphere, certainly a 3D object (despite some challenges even this), while our printed maps and digital screens are 2D. The intermediate step that transforms the sphere into our 2D maps, whether it be a cartographic atlas or a fancy GIS app, is called map projection.

I have often seen beautiful population maps circulating online; however, I usually got stuck at some technical parts, like visualizing other map segments than shown in the tutorial or turning the large-scale raster data into more computation-friendly vector formats. I overcome some of these shortcomings in this article with a hands-on guide to two primary global population data sources.

Despite their many advantages, accessing nature and green spaces is getting increasingly difficult in highly urbanized areas. Some fear that underserved communities are more exposed to these issues. Here, I propose a data-driven way to explore this.

The Manhattan Project was one of the largest scientific collaborations ever undertaken. It operated thanks to a complex social network of extraordinary minds and it became undoubtedly one of the most remarkable intellectual efforts of human history. It also had devastating consequences during and after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite the loss of hundreds of thousands of human lives during the bombing and the subsequent events, the scientific journey itself stands as a testament to human achievement, as highlighted in Christopher Nolan’s film portrayal of Oppenheimer.

One of my favorite visualization types shows the road network of cities, combining network sciecne, geospatial data science, and visualization al at once. Here, I share a code snippet on how to design figures like the ones attached.

A megszokott ismeretterjesztő könyvektől eltérően Janosov Milán első kötetében arra vállalkozott, hogy meghökkentő kérdésfelvetéssekkel és megközelítésekkel közelebb hozza hozzánk azt a tudományt, amely behálózza az életünket. Az adatok és a hálózatok szinte mindenütt jelen vannak, de lehetnek szórakoztatóak is, sőt számos korábban ismeretlen utat nyithatnak meg előttünk.

The private life of star actors and actresses is beyond doubt a major topic of tabloids, while, ideally, it is no place for network science, right? Everybody marries once and lives happily ever after, resulting in a lot of (network) pairs - couples of married people, linked by a marriage tie. Well, turns out, not so much in Hollywood!

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) built a unique wildlife habitat geospatial database incorporating data about more than 100,000 species. In this article, I explore how geospatial data science and network science can be combined to study the different patterns in different species’ cohabitation with the hope of contributing to future protection policies.

Knowledge graphs represent the logical, reasonable connections between real-world entities and concepts. To illustrate this, I combined two of my favorite topics - #networkscience and #geospatialdata by mapping out Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia knowledge network connecting #Spatialanalysis and #Businessintelligence.

In my blog posts, I explored how to use satellite images and image processing techniques to measure the so-called NDVI, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, which is a geospatial metric capturing the level of vegetation. While these maps are beautiful and interesting, certainly have several real-life use-cases as well.

Benford’s law, or the first-digit law, states that in many real-life numerical data sets, the frequency of the leading digit is inversely proportional to its face value. This means that, for instance, there are much more numbers starting with the digit 1 than with the digit 9. See how I validated this using texts from the NYT and TED here.

This study on canine brain networks reveals several new findings on mammalian brain evolution and presents the first anatomically-defined ROI (region of interest) based functional network map of the companion dog brain combining fMRI, ethology, and network science.

March 14, or 3/14, is also called International Pi Day and is the annual celebration of the irrational mathematical constant π, which starts at 3.1415926535897932… To illustrate the non-repeating decimals of π, I visualise and colour code the first 4, 16, 64, 256, 1024, and 4096 digits of π.

What will be the greatest trends in data science for this year? My annual survey question from the GPT engines, this time from the most hyped ChatGPT, paired with a network visualization highlighting the key topics related to #datascience on Twitter.

Weekly pop-cult and data collab from me covering Netflix’s disturbing blockbuster psycho-thriller, You. The visualisation, created with Python and Matplotlib shows how much the show is about ‘you’ each season.

The second issue of Data Visualization Society’s fabulous printed Nightingale arrived a few weeks ago - proudly featuring my article Genius Cliques - Mapping out the Nobel Network article on science history. In this work, I mapped out the co-reference network of all the Laurates based on their Wikipedia profiles.

Road networks are the bird-eye view fingerprints of cities, age-old topics of urban planning, and stable cornerstones of spatial data science. As a primary goal of today’s urban planning is to design livable, future-proof cities via concepts like the 15-minute city, here I collect the top lists of most livable cities and give a visual overview of their road networks – with a ChatGPT twist.

After a long qualifying process packed with surprises and last-minute drama, the FIFA World Cup 2022 kicked off on the 20th of November in Qatar. In this short piece, we explore what the small and interconnected world of football stars looks like, which teams are the best mentors, and how networks influence the World Cup ranking.

The geospatial analytics world runs the #30DayMapChallenge every November. This year I took part in it for the first time, and closed off the challenge with this piece - collecting all the tweets using the movements’ hashtag, turning the tweet’s into a hashtag network, and concluding a few interesting findings about the geospatial data landscape.

As I recently finished the prequel novel, Fire and Blood, and looking forward to the new spinoff series now out on HBO, I decided to give another for the Game of Thrones network. To this end, I collected the full cast of the story, built some language processing codes, and draw up the network of Targaryans - and their dragons.

Black holes are some of the most mysterious objects in the universe. Neural networks are also mysterious, in a way, because they are complex systems that can learn and make predictions. Could there be a way to combine these two things? I gave it a shot during the first wave of Midjourney-based image generation.

The concept of 15-minute cities, and urban accessibility, are of major importance in today’s urban planning. Additionally, also a domain where network science, data science, and geospatial analytics all meet - hence, the nice maps, and useful applications. In this piece, I explore Budapest through this lens.

Exploring @PrettyMaps, the open-source Python-based data visualization tool that pulls data from OpenStreetMap and visualizes urban spaces like road networks and POIs in a unique, beautiful form. In these posts, I show a few iconic landmarks drawn up with this tool.

It’s May the 4th, so here comes my traditional Star Wars Sith-Jedi co-mention network based on Wookieepedia. In this visual exercise, each node corresponds to a Sith or Jedi master, who are colored accordingly, while two individuals are linked if their fandom wiki sites refer to each other.

As an avid fan of the Vikings, I was extremely excited about the new spin-off on Netflix titled Vikings. Simultaneously, my network-and-data-scientist self was just as curious about how the original series and the new one will relate to each other. Thus, I decided to build a network of the realm of the Vikings shows.

The Academy Awards have been one of the most prestigious awards in the film industry for nearly a century, acknowledging both individual and movie-level achievements. One of the most striking of these, strongly embedded in a network of stars, is the award of actors and actresses - and here I am exploring how these network links.

The award-winning historical drama series is centered around Birmingham, England, starring a notorious gangster family, the Shelbys with signature haircuts and an unforeseeable future - until network science and machine learning get added to the picture and works out a giant spoiler.

At this time of the year, we can hear many expert opinions and predictions about the biggest trends for the coming new year. The same goes for my profession, data science as well. However, this time I decided to ask this crucial question to Open AI’s GPT-3 text completion engine.

I used the Witcher, a fantasy novel series by Andrzej Sapkowski, later a popular computer game and a Netflix show, to showcase how data science and text analysis can be used to extract and visualize the backbone of a complex series of events by building a social map of the Witcher.

Despite their significant impact on social and economic development, innovation districts are facing challenges due to the inadequacy of policies in terms of horizontal and vertical coordination or due to the lack of an integrative policy approach. Strategic and targeted policy support leads to the acceleration of the growth of innovation districts, impacting the development of cities in general. Here we present a data-driven methodology that unites network science and geospatial analytics to identify and characterize these districts within a handful of major European cities.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is widely considered to be the best science fiction novel series ever written. Here we show how data science can transform this brilliant novel series into a network, which then turns into an NFT artwork, while the publication’s text is being extended by AI-written paragraphs.

A major section of the BarabasiLab - Hidden Patterns Exhibition at Ludwig Museum Budapest covered the Hungarian Art Network, showcasing our first attempt to map out the hidden network connections in the contemporary art scene in Hungary. We published the story behind this network in the book titled ‘Élek Mentén’.

With Albert-László Barabási, we ventured into the rising field of NFTs and crypto art by mapping out one of the most dominant platforms, Superrare, then turned the network visualizations into NFTs sold on Foundation and Superrare, and got them showcased from the New York Times to the Miami Art Week.

NFTs are on the right - the whole art world is trying to wrap its head around it. With Albert-László Barabási, we ventured into this brand new field of crypto art by mapping out one of the most dominant platforms, Superrare, first featured in the art magazine XIBT.

With the restrictions that have been in place for the past three months, probably many of us miss the hospitality sector that usually fills our city with life while also functioning as a melting pot for the various communities. While we are waiting for the reopening, Urbanum’s team joined forces with a group of data scientists to explore the gastronomical network of downtown Budapest…

Here I happened to visually map the network of topics on the Hungarian science populizer portal Qubit by first extracting the keywords from all their 2020 articles, and then organizing them into a textual network based on the keywords co-occurrence.

Here, we provide new insights into the role of randomness in the impact of creative careers: first, we systematically untangle luck and individual ability from luck and compare the luck factor between numerous fields; then we show the surprising presence of randomness in the relationship between collaboration networks and timing of career hits.

Read about our start-up story: Datapolis, the new business engaged in data-driven urban planning and location intelligence focusing on combining a wide scale of locational data to answer business questions and help to design more livable and sustainable cities.

As the coronavirus is spreading across the globe it has also inspired a great number of research projects aiming to either find the cure or ease the many burdens caused by the pandemic. Here I use network and data science to briefly overview some of these research directions by analyzing the textual content of the latest publications.

What does the current research-landscape of climate change look like? What are the key topics and main directions? Here I explore these questions with the help of recent research advances in text processing, network analysis, the science of success, and data visualization.

In this paper, we explored the effect of collaboration patterns of the most popular DJs ever featured in the DJ Mag’s Top 100 and contrasted their network patterns to their success. We both identified a glass ceiling separating all-time stars from the rest of the DJ world, and a controversial effect of mentorship.

As the holiday season is approaching, also reflected in Google Trends, probably many of us are preparing to enjoy some recreational movie nights – but where to start? Here I analyze 7,512 movies from IMDb that users related to Christmas by building the co-occurrence network of different plot keywords, and a similarity network of movies recommended for Christmas, from “Die Hard” to “Home Alone”.

CEU has a community of almost 15,000 alumni from more than 130 countries around the world. This visualization shows their network: the nodes represent the alumni, and the links between them express their similarity. Their similarity, the weight of the links, is one if the end nodes share only one of the following attributes: citizenship, year of graduation, and program.

In this digital humanities collaboration, we united network science, data analysis, and medieval history to uncover some mysteries of the Habsburg Central Europe in the 16th-17th centuries.

The new season of Game of Thrones is almost upon us and fans are excited about what it may bring. To spoil it a little, I built the social network of GoT characters and used it to first quantify each character’s social interaction patterns via network science. Then I used these network features to predict the characters’ fate using machine learning methods.

During my Master’s thesis work, with Tamás Vicsek and Gábor Vásárhelyi we propose a bio-inspired, agent-based approach to describe the natural phenomenon of group chasing in both two and three dimensions. We implemented a unique collective chasing strategy, optimized its parameters, and studied its properties when chasing a much faster, erratic escaper.

We collected all the tweets containing the #IstandwithCEU hashtag, using the official Twitter API, since the #IstandwithCEU hashtag’s first appearance. Based on the first ten thousand tweets with the tag, we created a network of the most popular additional hashtags, also used in these tweets.