Next generation’s search engine

"The search engine Google is a master at ranking individual sites on the internet, but it doesn’t see how everything is connected in the landscape of sites linking to sites”, says Martin Rosvall.

Physicist Martin Rosvall recently presented his latest research at the Västerbotten PR event held at Grand Hotel in Stockholm to an awed audience. A number of cell phone operators as well as Microsoft immediately picked up the scent.  A map generator for online networks. This was something completely new. Finally there was a way of boiling down all computer traffic for Facebook, Twitter and more, and being able to draw conclusions from the information.

Martin Rosvall says: ”Nobody in the world of science has done this before. For over ten years, scientists have tried to design algorithms that can find important structures in networks, based on a mass of online data. We’ve developed a method that makes it better and more easily accessible.”

Swedish doctor Hans Rosling struck the world with awe when he, through statistics and his Gapminder, was able to refute old myths about the Third World. He demonstrated how a small statistical progress over time has led to a decrease in infant mortality and more countries increasing their national wealth over the last fifty years. Contrary to the idea many people have of the Third World. 

Coherent information

But while Hans Rosling’s calculations are based on numbers, Martin Rosvall’s are built on relationships.

Martin Rosvall says: ”This could be the next generation’s search engine that doesn’t just take us straight to the site, but allows us to navigate and explore with a better overview. We developed mathematics to measure how well a map captures what it represents. The more regularity we find in a network, the more we can compress it and make it easy to overview. It’s based on information theory.”

Martin is currently working in a research team for the Federal Reserve in the USA to find out what caused the bank crisis in September 2008.

“All of a sudden banks didn’t trust each other anymore, and they stopped lending money. We are looking at how the loan structure changed, in order to understand what happened. When we find the structure in the network, they’ll hopefully be able to see when a new crisis is under way in the future.”

Since the project is classified, he cannot show any results from the investigation, but a scientific publication is on its way.

On the market for partners

Together with graduate student Daniel Edler, Martin has developed interactive Flash applications to explain the mathematics behind the method, and to make it possible for anybody to make maps out of networks.

“The visualization makes it possible for anybody to understand how the method works”, says Daniel.

The chart generator is still under development but Martin Rosvall is hoping to have it commercialized in the near future.

Martin Rosvall says: “We’re just two researchers, but if there were ten of us we’d be able to realize the potential of our methods and ideas much faster. The dream is to create a type of “Google Maps” for networks. “

Read more and explore the mathematics behind the map generator