V-Shift

On 7 October 2024, Ákos Holányi was guest speaker at the Small (nation-)states research centre at the Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University in Prague. In his lecture, he introduced the Babel Machine and presented the results of the first year of poltextLAB’s flagship research endeavour, the Momentum V-SHIFT project. He showed how the saliency of and sentiment towards great powers and European powers have changed over thirty years in the Croatian, Czech, and Hungarian parliaments.

On the second day of the 28th Annual Conference of Central European Political Science Association (CEPSA) in Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, Ákos Holányi participated in the Parliamentarism and national bargaining in the EU panel with research from poltextLAB’s Momentum V-SHIFT project. In his presentation entitled “Drifting towards the East? Sentiment towards great powers in Central-Eastern European parliaments”, he discussed how the salience of and sentiment towards China, Russia, and the United States changed over thirty years in Croatian, Czech, and Hungarian parliaments. The program of the conference is available here: https://www.cepsanet.org/uploads/1/2/2/4/122417138/cepsa-program-2024.pdf

On the first day of the 28th Annual Conference of Central European Political Science Association (CEPSA) in Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, Ákos Holányi participated in the The Russian war in Ukraine panel with research from poltextLAB’s V4 Media Slant project. In his presentation entitled “The Depiction of the War in Ukraine” in Central European media, he showed preliminary results about how the topics and emotional content of Czech and Hungarian media coverage of the Russia-Ukraine War changed in the first two years of the invasion. The program of the conference is available here: https://www.cepsanet.org/uploads/1/2/2/4/122417138/cepsa-program-2024.pdf.

The following interns join poltextLAB in the 2024-25 autumn semester: Patrik Bodó  Hanna Csikós  Tamás Fenyődi  Zsolt Geszler  Dániel Nagy  Dénes Stumpf 

On September 26, 2024, a new article has been published by Miklós Sebők, Orsolya Ring, Márk György Kis, Martin Balázs Bánóczy and Ágnes Dinnyés in the Journal of Computational Social Science. The title of the article is “The geopolitics of vaccine media representation in Orbán’s Hungary—an AI-supported sentiment analysis.” The publication is available here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42001-024-00325-z.

The poltextLAB team’s Babel Machine project has been highlighted as an open call success story among the SLICES-SC Open Call winners, who have benefitted from the SLICES infrastructure. Our participation in the SLICES-SC project lasted from April 2023 to August 2024, during which the team was able to use the imec research group iLab.t’s GPULab infrastructure. The GPULab is a testbed with 125+ GPUs with over 570.000+ cuda cores and 1.8TB+ GPU RAM for AI research and every research that needs GPUs. The flyer detailing the success story can be downloaded here: https://slices-sc.eu/an-open-call-success-story-i-the-babel-machine/

Miklós Sebők has been chosen as one of the winners of the first tier of the Excellence programme, belonging to the National Research, Development and Innovation Office’s National Research Excellence Programme. The “BABELGLOB: A State-of-the-Art AI Tool for the Global Analysis of Policy Frames” project has received 50 million HUF in funding. Further reading (in Hungarian): https://nkfih.gov.hu/hivatalrol/sajtokozlemenyek/ket-kutato-nyert

On June 26, 2024, Miklós Sebők gave a presentation entitled “No-code AI text analytics at your fingertips: research time travels with the Babel Machine” at the 4th Strategic Workshop of the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Network. In the presentation he explained how the Babel Machine, developed by poltextLAB for free academic use, can replace time-consuming traditional content analysis. With this development, the research group aims to democratise access to artificial intelligence. The presentation is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwfIgXQU_Yg

On June 20, 2024, Rebeka Kiss attended the Tag der Parlamentsforschung – Day of Parliamentary Research conference organised by the Österreichisches Parlament in Vienna. Rebeka Kiss presented co-authored work with Miklós Sebők on  “The concept of tailor-made laws and legislative backsliding in Central-Eastern Europe.” The programme of the conference is available here: https://www.parlament.gv.at/dokument/fachinfos/parlamentsforschung/Day-of-Parliamentary-Research-2024-Abstracts.pdf.

On June 18, 2024, Sean Theriault,  guest speaker of the VSHIFT Momentum project at poltextLAB, gave a lecture at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences Institute for Political Science with the title “The Policy Agendas of a Global Power: The Case of the Holy See.” Theriault is a professor at the University of Texas; his expertise include the U.S. Congress, the presidency, political parties, elections, and party ploarization. He is the author of five books and numerous articles in a variety of journals on subjects ranging from presidential rhetoric to congressional careers and the Louisiana Purchase to the Pendleton Act of 1883.The abstract of his lecture is available here: https://politikatudomany.tk.hu/esemeny/2024/05/speaker-series-sean-theriault.