On 12 December 2025, Miklós Sebők received the Bibó István Memorial Prize, awarded by the Hungarian Political Science Association. The prize, founded in 2014, is regarded as the most prestigious lifetime achievement award in Hungarian political science and is conferred annually on a single Hungarian scholar. In his talk, Dr Sebők presented the opportunities and challenges of using AI in political research.
As part of the Data-SHS Week 2025 Paris Île-de-France, researchers and engineers gathered to discuss the growing role of data and methods in the humanities and social sciences. The week featured conferences, workshops, and training sessions organized locally by the Paris-region University Data Platforms, in collaboration with numerous institutional partners. Within the session “Recent advances in the use of AI methods in the humanities and social sciences,” Barbara Babolcsay from poltextLAB presented work on improving the exploration and accessibility of research data through the automated assignment of concepts in research data repositories. The presentation highlighted how AI-based methods can support researchers in navigating large and complex corpora, enhancing data reuse and fostering new research perspectives in the humanities and social sciences.
On 9 December 2025, guest researcher Nathalie Neptune gave her second workshop at poltextLAB titled An Integrated Geospatial–Policy Analysis of Forest Loss in Hungary. She presented how satellite-based indicators of forest loss and vegetation stress can be integrated with legal and policy data to analyse forest management and wildfire control in Hungary. The workshop illustrated how changes in forest legislation, public spending, and policy discourse can be linked to observable environmental outcomes using advanced statistical methods. The presentation highlighted the importance of combining geospatial and legislative evidence to support data-driven forestry and fire management decisions. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences Distinguished Guest Scientists Fellowship Programme supports this research.
On 2 December 2025, Barbara Babolcsay delivered a presentation at the 17th European DDI Users Conference as part of the panel “Challenges of Interoperability”. In her presentation, titled Using NLP Methods in Social Sciences – Experience and Opportunities, she outlined recent applications of clustering, topic modelling and automated text classification developed within the Ontolisst project, highlighting their relevance for large-scale social science research. Further details of the event can be found here: https://events.geant.org/event/1879/timetable/
On 2 December 2025, Miklós Sebők served as panel chair of a session at the 17th European DDI Users Conference. The main theme of the panel was about the METACURATE-ML project within the “ESRC Future Data Services Programme”. Further details of the event can be found here: https://events.geant.org/event/1879/timetable/