This Week in Neo4j – Graphs in AI and ML, Graph Data Science Sandbox, COVID-19 analysis, GRANDstack Access Control, and More

Our featured community member this week is Weidong Yang. Weidong is the founder and CEO of Kineviz. He holds a doctorate in Physics and a Masters in Computer and Information Science. After conducting theoretical and experimental research on quantum dots, he worked for 10 years as a product manager and R&D scientist in the Semiconductor industry. He has been awarded 11 US patents and contributed to 20+ peer review publications. Alongside Kineviz, Weidong co-founded Kinetech Arts, a non-profit organization that brings dancers and engineers together to explore the creative potential of new technologies in making art.

Weidong gave a talk at NODES 2019 on graph business intelligence analysis where he demonstrated how to use Neo4j along with Kineviz GraphXR.

Thanks so much Weidong for sharing your enthusiasm for graphs with the world!

Follow Weidong on Twitter!

In this week’s video from the NODES 2019 online conference, Alicia Frame talks about how to use graphs to improve machine learning models. Alicia covers building and querying knowledge graphs, using Cypher and graph algorithms for feature engineering, graph embeddings, and graph neural networks.

Watch Alicia’s Talk

This week we launched a new Neo4j Sandbox project for Graph Data Science.

If you’re not familiar with Neo4j Sandbox, it’s a great way to try out Neo4j in a hosted online environment with different datasets and a guided experience. The new Graph Data Science sandbox shows how to use the Neo4j Graph Data Science library to run graph algorithms such as PageRank, community detection, and node similarity. Also included is visualizing graph data with Neo4j Bloom, including results of the algorithms in the visualization. Just launch the new Neo4j Data Science sandbox to try it out.

If you’d prefer to read a blog post about using Neo4j Graph Data Science with Neo4j Bloom then this post “Hands-On With The Neo4j Graph Data Science Sandbox” will walk you through the process of starting a sandbox, running graph algorithms, and creating rule-based styles in Neo4j Bloom to style the visualization relative to the results of the graph algorithms.

Read The Blog Post

Understandably there’s a lot of interest around data related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Neo4j community has been working with analyzing some of this data in Neo4j.

David Allen shared queries for importing data from Johns Hopkins into Neo4j to model COVID-19 infections throughout the world. You can combine this dataset with the Neomap Graph App to visualize infection data throughout the world in a heatmap.

The folks at Kineviz have built an interactive graph visualization with data from Nextstrain and the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) that shows genetic mutations of the COVID-19 virus as it spreads across the globe.

From the Neo4j community in China is an example of using Neo4j to build a web application to find if you’ve been in a location with someone with the virus. Joshua Yu has kindly translated a blog post about this project and posted it to Neo4j Community Site.

Are you working on a project using public data with Neo4j? Please share it on the Neo4j Community Site to tell us what you’re working on.

Explore Community Projects

Ian Kleats published a 5 post blog series exploring access control in GraphQL APIs built with GRANDstack. He starts by building a GraphQL schema using neo4j-graphql.js then moves on to GraphQL query transformation, ultimately showing how to implement schema directives that can be used to add authorization rules that take advantage of the filtering functionality built into GRANDstack.

This is a great dive into the world of GraphQL tooling – along the way you’ll learn about ASTs, visitor functions, GraphQL schema directives, query transformation and GraphQL filter arguments.

Read the series

Our tweet of the week is a reminder that there are some awesome job opportunities at Neo4j:

You can head straight to the Neo4j jobs listing to learn more.