Olympics, water polo and networks – a slightly biased pondering on chances

The whole world is wildly excited about this year’s olympic games, starting this Friday in London. Every country has its favourite sport, usually the one they are very good at: England has polo, Brazil football, and the United States cheers for just about everything, especially swimming. It is safe to assume, that water polo is the sport that makes the heart of Hungarian sportslovers throb the most. Earlier on, we have taken a look at analysis based on a network representing ball passing habits of football teams, but since the Hungarian team failed to make it to the European Championship, we were unable to conduct a more in-depth analysis. We did however prepare a small summary of the past 4 years olympic water polo results.  Maven7’s money is on Olympic Gold for Hungary, but our objectivity might have failed us on that one. On the other hand, we do have the last ten years results to back up our hunch.

The first picture shows all the games that took place at the last 4 olympics, with the dots representing various countries, green lines showing the winners, and the red ones the draws (i.e. France – Germany). The thicker the line, the more similar the outcomes between the teams were; in Hungary’s case, the strong connections to Greece, the Netherlands and Russia tell us, that we defeated them more than once. The size of the dots increases with the number of games won, whereas the size of the labels grows with the number of games played. The countries that seized to exist since the games are labelled white.


All in all 23 teams and 21 countries earned their quota to the Olympics in the past 12 years. The odd difference between those two numbers is due to changes of regime across Eastern Europe, that varied the names but not the line-up of the leading teams.  The most radical historical alterations happened in countries strongly tied to water polo: Serbia and Montenegro separated, as did Czechoslovakia, and finally the end of the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) united team in 1992, including 12 countries came.

The quite dense second picture shows the medal-winning countries. In the next picture the colouring was not calibrated according to Olyimpic regulations. In water polo an olympic gold scores 7, a silver 5, and a bronze 4 points. The yellower a dot is, the more points the country earned (Hungary has 21) in the past 4 Olympics, while the grey ones never made it to the podium.

With 3 gold medals, the Hungarian team is by far the most successful, but the competition is doing just  as well. The Italian, Spanish and Serbian team all did very well, according to the sizes of their dots. Their position in the network tells us, that they are serious challengers, and their experience makes them dangerous opponents, that have beaten us in the past. The biggest losers include  Germany, Greece and  Australia.

For a closer look at our important opponents we re-sized the network. The next picture only shows nations, that have multiple (at least two) connections, meaning that they have faced each other more often, with similar results. Our team has defeated Italy and Greece more than once, but has lost to Spain on multiple occasions. The Croatian team has to look out for the United States and Spain, while the latter one should fear Serbia. There is a definite possibility of meeting the coloured teams in the finals.

In order to have a better chance at pondering on odds, we drew this hierarchical network of the last Olympics. The dashed lines show the qualifying matches, with results on the edges. The green lines point to the winners, the red ones the draws. The dots are coloured according to medals; Hungary-gold, USA-silver and Serbia-bronze.  Hungary won all its matches, except for the draw against Montenegro. It is quite interesting, that we did not have a game against our top rival Serbia. Lets hope that this time the experts are right, and out defeat at the European Championship will not cast a shadow on this years performance, so we can once again stand on our well-reserved spot on top of the podium.

Enjoy the game!

The Team of Maven7

Maven7 Iberia

Introducing Maven7 uniqe KOL mapping solution on the spanish market. - see article here (Spanish)

The power of network science, the beauty of network visualization

Albert-László Barabási started publishing a new network research book online. According to the author, this book aims to help anybody to understand the fundamental concepts of network research, so it presents many colorful and interesting real life examples, including the results of a research by Maven7. The book is the result of a collaboration between a number of individuals, shaping everything, from content (Laszlo Barabasi) to visualizations and interactivetools (Mauro Martino), simulations and data analysis (Márton Pósfai).

You can download from the official website the first two chapters with slides and you may follow the development of the writing of the book on Facebook and Twitter.

Social Media and the power of networks 1. – The Hungarian blog scene

Because of the spreading of Social Media usage the modern marketing agencies age are just gazing. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest, Google+, hundreds of blogs and so on without end. It is impossible to follow so many sites up-to-date. Also, it is not enough to only eximes these sites seperately, because the essence of the content generated by the users is the network effect, which causes the fast information spread. What can we do then? In our series, where we collected some of the latest network research results by Maven 7, we show how these findings can facilitate the on-line marketing specialists’, the PR specialists’ and product managerers’ lives.

We may trace back the beginning of Social Media to the blogs.  These contents are not the ordinary Social Media model, as we understand it today, but here the contents are already generated by users, as a major attribute of web2.0. The largest benefit of blogging is that anybody can write anything in a topic, and so the number of topics is practically endless. In 2006, the early times of Hungarian blogging, it was yet easy to keep count of bloggers. Then, thanks to its easy use, it rapidly started to increase.

But why are blogs so important for us after all? Considering that already more than ten thousand blogs exist and their reading blooms, a company needs to know who the Key Opinion Leaders are within the blog space, who have impact on their consumers. Network research provides help exactly in this. With the help of our unique methodology we can show who are the Key OpinionLeader is of a given topic, and we also can forecast who are the Rising Stars of the next generation.

Our research identified the Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) of IT related blogs within a Hungarian blog service provider.  According to the network approach we presume that readers of same blogs are interested in the same topics. So by examining the group of users and visitors, the most important characters of the topic can be identified. The importance of a blog not only depends on the number of visitors and clicks, but also that what kind of other blogs the same user reads at the same time. It is more expensive to advertise on a Key Opinion Leader blog (green node), than on an other blog, which is connected to it (red node). With our method anybody can identify new, relevant and not „used up” opinion leaders, and may also validate previous campaigns.

It is also an important question, which other topics are related to our professional field. For example, how much overlap is there between the community of IT blogs and the community of game blogs? The following picture shows how the IT community is connected to other blogs. The bigger the nodes are the more connection a given topic has to other topics.

                                                                                                              

Beyond the identification of blogs’ KOLs and Rising Stars we can identify KOLs of a specific topic within the whole Hungarian online space by using other sources from the Social Media, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn...

To be continued....

Mapping intracellular protein networks will help us discover cures

How the genes, the proteins and the metabolise link to each other forming a consistent network? This network is really the key to understand our human diseases.

Albert-László Barabási says we need a new medicine, its name is „network medicine”. It can help us understand the mechanism of diseases and would affect all aspects of health care.

By helping to map intracellular protein interactions, Albert-Lászlo Barabási hopes to trace disease tracks so better treatments can be devised.

The full lecture with Albert-László Barabási is on view on:

http://www.tedmed.com/talks/show?id=7282

There is a new tool in the pharmaceutical hand: Network research in the medical society

The economic crisis has negative effects on the pharmaceutical companies as well. The Széll Kálmán Plan has a big impact on expenses, thus the manufacturers need to rethink the marketing communications strategy on the home market because of the price of the innovative products and the low levels of public expenditures.

The base of innovation resides in exploitation of new approaches, new opportunities and techniques. To accomplish business plans new approaches and techniques are needed. More and more pharmaceutical companies choose the latest methods of network research which can help to react better to the disasters of the economic crisis. If we mix these type of researches, such as key opinion monitoring (KOL mapping) and the consumption patterns of media, we can confront pharmaceutical product managers with really interesting facts and patterns.

So the question is given:

How do the manufacturer and the distributor live with opportunities given by network research?

The full interview with Péter Ruppert and György Tímár, general managers of Maven7and Comfit is on view in the medical journal, Medical Tribune.

Excellence 2012

Tamás Vicsek, member of the Hungarian Academy of Science and professor of ELTE University was asked by European Research Council to hold a presentation at Excellence 2012 conference. Mr. Vicsek is going to represent Hungary and Central Europe in this scientific event.