Balázs Lengyel has received an Advanced Lendület grant from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The grant will enable ANETI to continue the development of our community and to expand into new research directions over the 2024-2029 period.

One of the major results in ANETI is a general framework of network divergence and convergence that can explain urban innovation as well as the dynamics of inequalities in cities. For example, we have demonstrated that income inequality grows in Hungarian towns where social network fragmentation is paired with initial inequalities that signals divergence (LINK to our Nature Communications paper). Yet, network bridging between fragments of the networks can help mixing. For example, bridging inventor collaborations across different specializations increase radical innovation (LINK to our Research Policy paper).

To better understand how network fragmentation and mixing leads to urban innovation and inequalities, ANETI research will add two missing elements to this framework during the Advanced Lendület project: mobility and information diffusion. The aim of the research is to explore missing causal relations between co-location, urban mobility, and information flows and the creation of knowledge and prosperity. ANETI will combine innovative survey application and data donation techniques with software version-control, urban mobility, online discussion, administrative, patent, and scientific publication datasets. The research will explore the temporal and spatial dimensions and the type of social interaction and model information diffusion in networks impacting groups, companies, neighbourhoods, and cities.