COVID-19 – Romanian Economic Impact Monitor

Lately, I was working on developing the visualizations for the COVID-19 – Romanian Economic Impact Monitor. This is a research project led by the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the Babes-Bolyai University – Romania’s largest and top-ranked) with specialists from the Babes-Bolyai University, myself from Lancaster University and the Romanian National Bank. This is the first concerted effort in our country to quantify the effects of the pandemic on the economy. Prepare for some Grafana beauty! 👇

🕹 Interactive

Bucharest 1930s 📽 old footage restored using machine learning

This is a follow-up on my recent post on automatic restoration of old video footage using machine learning.

📽 Source videos

Fining source videos for Bucharest project proved to be more challenging than for Budapest, but eventually I settled on a footage from the 1930s, often considered the golden age of the city – a time when it was also dubbed little Paris (this period is also called perioada interbelică – the period between the wars in Romanian)

Budapest 1896 📽 Automatic restoration of old video footage using machine learning

Recently, several videos have been popping up on the internet that showed really old video footage restored to modern standards. From a contextual perspective, it is a very fascinating process – i.e. using the knowledge of the past 100 years to create a better image of the even more distant past – but it is also an interesting machine learning application. In a nutshell, the process is the following: you show an algorithm a lot if images of how our world currently looks like, a few images about how our world used to look like in the past – and then it tries to recreate the feel of the modern images on the old images (and a video is just a bunch of images chained after another).

Ezt a bejegyzést magyar nyelven is olvashatod.

Perhaps the most prominent videos in this category are the ones made by Denis Shiryaev: Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat from 1896 and A Trip Through New York City from 1911. Denis shares the methodology only conceptually, but of course anyone in the know suspects that there are several steps involved. So, I looked for some old footage of Budapest and I had a nice weekend project lined up… But before I delve in, allow me to take off my 👒 in front of Denis – this was a reaaally long and a reaaally difficult process!

Modelling 🦠 Coronavirus – Quarantine?!

As coronavirus is threatening to become a global pandemic, I’ve built seven epidemiological models of increasing complexity in order to illustrate how infectious diseases get transmitted over time. Among others, I try to answer the questions of what is the scientific rationale behind a surgical mask or an all-out quarantine. This is a video commentary of a simulation modelling exercise using system dynamics – if you like it, maybe I’ll make some others in the future 😃.

Metrocyclopaedia 🚇 Interactive map of all metro systems of the world

I have been playing around quite a bit with CesiumJS recently. It is likely the best tool out there to visualize global datasets on an interactive 3D Earth in the browser.

As you might know from the title of his blog, 😁 I am fascinated by complex systems. A particular kind of complex systems are infrastructures, and 🇫🇷 metro 🇺🇸 subway 🇬🇧 underground 🇩🇪 U-bahn lines are one of the most mesmerizing pieces of infrastructure – as they give us an insight into how society organizes itself around patterns. But, unlike the road network, the metro system also gives us a sense of population density at a glance – provided that the city planners made the sensible decision to position the stations at the most frequented locations, which apparently does not always happen.

Recently, I have also been experimenting with 3D globes, with various oddball datasets.. For example, I’ve visualized all Antarctic research stations, Global Warming Stripes and more recently Traffic congestion. So my next project was to visualize the metro systems of the world, ideally all of them at once, if possible, on an interactive Earth.