Blog

Latest posts are from Medium, earlier ones are exlusively here

  • I published the first cartoons of The Data Department series
    07 November 2020

    • I was working on the illustrations for my book when things got out of control :) I found myself drawing into the nights and I just could not stop. It’s kind of relaxing, kind of fun and I’m sure there are people like me who enjoys stats jokes. So here it is. more...

  • Why do overdue tasks take still a long time to finish?
    01 April 2020

    • The prototypical situation that has been puzzling me for a while is the following:
    _- We estimated 3 days for a task
    • Bob has been working on the task for 3 days already
    • On the daily scrum, he says that he just needs to take care of a couple more things and the task will be finished
    • The task is not finished the next day_
    more...

  • Three challenges of the AI product lifecycle
    01 February 2020

    • Working on AI products — Whether it is retail, IoT, or marketing — data scientists face similar challenges. Some of these challenges are general to many technology areas, others are specific to AI, due to its unique way this field blurs the boundaries between state-of-the-art research and application development. Let’s look at three prototypical examples of these challenges in the areas of business specification, iterative development of analytics, and testing. more...

  • Lean + Data Science
    01 August 2019

    • I joined this field because of the excitement that we feel upon discovering new patterns in data. With time though, it became clear that identifying patterns is just the first half of this journey. There is another part, which is about sharing this discovery. ‘Sharing’ can be in the form of a presentation, in the form of a change in an existing product or even an entirely new product. Thus the two parts together — nurturing ideas from inception to a product — is the full stack of data science. more...

  • Test-driven development and data science
    01 March 2019

    • The previous two posts of this series were about the business and people perspectives of effective data science teams. However, in themselves they are only necessary but sufficient conditions: without the right tools and processes, the recipe does not work. more...

  • From talents to assets
    01 February 2019

    • After the first part of this mini-series, I received some very interesting insights from fellow data professionals. Interestingly, one of the recurring topics was talent management. This topic is also very close to me. I know from first-hand experience that without good mentors and talent management I would never have been able to get to this point and still enjoy so much my everyday work. In this article, I would like to discuss the two specific aspects of talent management. The first is nurturing talent during internships and the second is whether a computer science dropout or a fresh PhD is better material for a data scientist. more...

  • Business vision in effective data science teams
    01 January 2019

    • This is the first part of a mini-series that summarizes my impressions on what makes certain data science teams effective. Over the years, I have worked in several teams: teams of various sizes, from as small as a duo to as large as a dozen data experts; and of various players, from college dropout savants through rebranded software engineers to PhD/postdocs with long years of academic experience. My role was also changing, I started as a junior and with time and experience developed to be a team lead. more...

  • Our chapter is out in a Springer book
    04 September 2018

    • So this is a big day: our chapter on Cognitive Data Visualization has been published in the series Topics in Intelligent Engineering and Informatics. Aaand… this is the first time that my work can be found in books.google.com :) more...

  • The price of data and GDPR
    28 April 2018

    • 25 May 2018. The enforcement day of the famous or infamous GDPR, alias the EU General Data Protection Regulation. From that day, the current situation of data ownership and control changes… or does it. more...

  • Quantifying trust
    15 April 2018

    • I posted today some thoughts about how we can quantify trust on LinkedIn. Here is some exclusive blog content in the same topic. more...

  • Minimal example for the development of a data science product
    11 January 2018

    • Developing a data science product is the focus of many startups and enterprises in our time. Thousands of entrepreneurs are working on finding a way to create a better world or to make huge money. They all want to do this by using current developments in machine learning, data storage, cloud computing, and deep learning. Although many products are built on technology, data-driven products are unique since here the research results of last week may end up in a product already next month. And that is fast. The field is, therefore, filled with noise and buzz… more...

  • The invisible countries of the Big Data world
    20 December 2017

    • For almost ten years, every year on Christmas Eve, my mum took us in the car and drove to an old house in our village. We brought carefully wrapped toys and food to a family in need. She told us that the parents are very nice people and have children who are our age. Since this was a small village, I once asked my mum, “Do I know the children?” My mum looked at me and said, “I don’t think so, you know people in need only if you look for them.” more...

  • My favourite mini tools that make my days easier
    28 November 2017

    • I’ve been thinking about this post for a while now: I’ve collected a handful of great mini tools which I use day by day to make my life easier. These are various small one-functional web or offline tools, some of which you may find useful as well. more...

  • There are some really interesting things in November
    05 November 2017

    • I’ve had a very interesting start for the autumn: not only gave a nice keynote at IEEE CogInfoCom about the Neuroscience of Virtual Reality, but also the track that we organized with my father Zsolt Török received the Best Session Award. It is really good to feel that our work invested pays off. And there are some interesting things coming in November. more...

  • Using deep learning to create personalized ads
    14 July 2017

    • I’ve finally managed to find some time to write a short post about our winning solution at the Telekom Leading Data Hackathon. The aim of this post is to give an example of how to use deep learning in a practical business use case. more...

  • Virtual teleportation changes how we think of space
    11 May 2017

    • The prestigious journal Psychophysiology has just published our new paper on the neural background of navigation. For the impatient (like myself) I’m summarising the interesting parts of the results and methods here. more...

  • Our human grid cell study is in PNAS
    14 April 2017

    • About five years ago, we have come up with a idea about grid cells that challenged mainstream scientific thinking. While grid cells in rodent form a context independent coordinate system for spatial navigation, we thought that their activity actually does depend on the context in humans. To verify this we designed an experiment where epliepsy patients with implanted electrodes had to navigate in virtual environments of different sizes. more...

  • Bayesianism vs Frequentism
    26 March 2017

    • In recent times the popularity of Bayesian statistics has greatly increased, thanks to the large computing power of modern computers. As a result, there is an ongoing debate on whether the Bayesian or frequentist approach is more suitable for statistical and scientific purposes. A great number of introductory papers on these two schools of statistical inference are available online, therefore I will not spend time reiterating the basic definitions here (for those who are interested I recommend these two documents, which contain excellent introductions to the topic). Instead, my goal is to take a look at which of these two approaches is worth following in order to reach the right statistical conclusions – whatever the definition of ‘right’ may be. more...

  • Pilot experiment for Twisted Gravity
    19 March 2017

    • I’ve just returned from pilot testing in the VeME lab directed by Elisa Ferré at Royal Holloway, University of London thanks to my EPS grant. We are studying how vestibular and visual informations interact in the perception of gravity. We focus the current experiment on the dynamic nature of gravity, namely the perception of moving objects. more...

  • Our paper in PLoSONE
    14 January 2017

    • Good start for 2017: our paper is in PLoSONE! more...
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