Lunchlezing ING

About me:
My name is Levi Prikken, a second year master student Industrial and Applied Mathematics and active member of GEWIS, and I have recently completed my three-month internship at ING. I want to share with you my story as a student. I will show you what my project entailed as well as tell you how it felt to make the switch from academia to business.
About the lunch lecture:
More and more data is available nowadays, so it becomes easier to use this data to build sizable graphs. Due to the capacity to increase the volume, large-scale network analysis is becoming an appealing field of research. One of the questions asked is, how can one now extract useful information out of such a gigantic network?
At ING Wholesale Banking all company transactions are represented in an immense network of more than 400 million edges. I have had the opportunity to analyse this great network, using a new Spark package called GraphFrames. My own research focused on what type of companies would have a significant influence on the network and why. To address this question, we first must know how to define influence in this context; and how it translates to influence in a real-life situation.
During the lunch lecture we will tackle all these questions and I will explain to you how I have struggled through the exploration of the network, and its influencers, as a student. While doing so, I will also give you a better idea of how it felt like to start working at ING, when you have only experienced the university life so far.