The HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences (Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence) is a research institution where 200 Hungarian and international researchers engage in exploratory and innovative national and international research projects in diverse fields of the social sciences. The Centre’s research activities focus on sociology, political science, computational social science, network science, minority studies, and law. Researchers take an interdisciplinary approach in their scientific work. The Centre’s main goals are to extend the quality of Hungarian research to Europe and beyond, to take a prominent regional lead in social science research, and to serve as a point of scientific reference in Hungary. Researchers at the Centre have actively engaged in numerous international projects. Currently the Centre acts as lead partner and work package leader of MI-related projects CODE Europe (launching in January 2021) and OPTED.
Our AI-related research covers, inter alia, the following topics: natural language processing, topic modelling, social network analysis, the analysis of sensor data, and the social and legal impact of AI.
Most important projects
CODE EUROPE - Co-Deciding Europe: Civic Tech for Good Governance and Active Citizenship! (2021-2023) project granted by EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Regional Cooperation (project leader)
Led by CSS, a 12-member EU consortial project will develop a universally applicable methodology -the E-Participation Assessment Framework- to allow objective comparison of the results of e-participation projects across time and geographical space and use it for evaluating the crowdsourcing pilots. The goal is to deliver guidelines for ethical ‘social listening’ to benefit from the availability of big data while protecting individual privacy and safeguarding citizens against inappropriate access and use of data.The project aims to ensure systematic and impactful knowledge-sharing and exchange of good practices amongst the transnational community of policy makers, academics, businesses and NGOs. The project leader is Bence Ságvári, senior research fellow at CSS and head of CSS-RECENS.
OPTED – Observatory for Political Texts in European Democracies – A European Research Infrastructure (2020-2023); H2020 project (work package leader)
Launched in collaboration with 18 prestigious European partner institutions, the 3-year research project called OPTED. The aim of the consortia is to develop a common European infrastructure for the analysis of policy texts. In the research program starting in October 2020, the Centre is represented by the POLTEXT project led by Miklós Sebők. The sub-project focuses on the collection, harmonization, publication and analysis of textual data related to parliamentary decision-making at both national and European level. The databases to be built during the research will contain the speeches of the representatives, as well as the legislation, the bills and their amendments, and new research will be launched in cooperation with the participants of the consortium.
Selected publications
Lengyel B, Varga A, Ságvári B, Jakobi Á, Kertész J (2015) Geographies of an online social network. PLOS ONE 10(9): E0137248. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0137248
Lőrincz, L., Koltai, J., Győr, A. F., & Takács, K. (2019). Collapse of an online social network: Burning social capital to create it?. Social Networks, 57, 43-53.
Tóth, G., Wachs, J., Di Clemente, R., Jakobi, Á., Ságvári, B., Kertész, J., & Lengyel, B. (2019). Inequality is rising where social network segregation interacts with urban topology. (megjelenés alatt, Nature Communications)
Sebők, Miklós; Kacsuk, Zoltán: The Multiclass Classification of Newspaper Articles with Machine Learning: The Hybrid Binary Snowball Approach. Political Analysis (2020) IF: 4,232
Sebők, Miklós – Kozák, Sándor: From State Capture to ‘Pariah’ Status? The Preference Attainment of the Hungarian Banking Association (2006-2014), Business and Politics (2020)
Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont (Centre for Social Sciences)
4 Tóth Kálmán utca
H-1097 Budapest, Hungary
+36 1 224 6700