István Szakadat

He has been working as an associate professor at the Department of Sociology and Communication (SZOC) of the Budapest University of Technology (BME) since 1987. He defended his PhD thesis in Sociology in 1999.

His teaching and research topics include the presentation and research of action theories, political actions, new media, and the regularities of network communication.

In addition to his academic career, he participated in various experimental projects from the beginning of Hungarian digital culture, and then joined industrial initiatives related to new media. Between 1994 and 1997, he was one of the leaders of the ABCD Magazine CD-ROM periodical, and then participated in the planning and management of the Internet projects of the Hungarian Telecommunications Company (Matáv).

Since 2002, he has been the professional leader of the Media Education and Research Center (MOKK), jointly founded by Magyar Telekom and BME. In the 2000s, he researched the application possibilities of language technology and other semantic technologies in various research and development projects together with consortium partners (in the Network of Words, Adatrosta, Szószablya, Hunglish and the Hungarian Unified Ontology projects). He participated in the preparation process of the National Audiovisual Archive (NAVA), then in the design of the NAVA meta-information system, and in the development of the concept of the National Digital Data Repository (NDA), then the Hungarian NDA (MaNDA), the launch of the system and its further development.

In 2009, he joined the University of All Knowledge (ME) 2.0 project, where he managed the development of the ME 2.0 portal. In 2007, he published a book on the characteristics of new media entitled “The Whole in One”.

Later, his interest turned to action and game theory. He wrote a textbook on this topic in 2008 (“Action Theory in a Nutshell”), and then published another book in 2014 (“syi.hu/cse”).

Honors: Ferenc Erdei Award (shared, Hungarian Sociological Association, 1991); Outstanding Lecturer (BME Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, 2001).