János Bíró, member of the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies has just returned from Cracow where he presented at a conference.
„With ITMO University (University of St. Petersburg) as the main organizer and the support of AGH University of Cracow, young researchers –among them PhD students and a handful of MA students - had the opportunity to present their findings at a conference. These students are the ones whose dissertation had been chosen for publication in the Procedia Computer Science Journal and will also be available online on sciencedirect.com.

I presented a study that is based on network analysis. I analyzed the Facebook networks of 7 Hungarian political parties through the methods of basic network statistics, community detection and the exponential random graph model (ERGM). I was curious about the structure of the network and was interested to see how the different attributes influenced the likes between pages with ERGM.

Currently I am not sure if I want to enter the scientific world, since I am only about to finish my BA studies, but I am certainly enjoying the environment owing to the Szabó Kálmán Talent Program.”

János Bíró heard of this program 4 years ago when he was still student of the St. László Catholic School in the town of Kisvárda.
„The network of Rajk students was at work, they came and introduced the program to their old school. This is how I heard about the program through two students and the possibilities offered by it.

I believe that besides the financial support the best thing about the program is the active professional and community background it offers. This is a distinctive feature owing to which I became familiar with the philosophy of the Rajk College, their attitude to the world. It was so attractive that I wanted to become part of the community. As for the Szabó Kálmán Talent Program, it gave me a push-start, a great opportunity to reach something more, bigger, something that I had always dreamt of. In fact, later on I had the chance to act as coordinator of the program, an activity that I have not given up to this day.”

What would you ask from the famous network researcher Albert-László Barabási?
János Bíró’s question:What would be an exciting topic in the empirical analysis of Facebook that awaits further research?

Kioszk found out! Albert-László Barabási’s answer: Whether people can truly influence each other, or tend to agree only because their friends think alike.