Using Neo4j Bloom for fraud detection, discovery and visualization

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been discussing and showing Neo4j's new Bloom graph discovery and visualization product to everyone that would have a moment to spare. It's soooo much fun to show a tool you love, and Bloom is definitely one of those. And I have also recorded some odf these demo-sessions - you can find part 1, part 2 and part 3 of these recordings on this blog. All of these recordings use my (in)famous Belgian Beergraph dataset - and that's all good fun...

But of course, exploring a beergraph is not really a "business-y" use case. So I decided I would record a Bloom demo using a realistic dataset that centers around using Neo4j for Fraud Detection purposes. You will find all of the important concepts of the Beergraph demos here as well:

• navigating the graph using graph patterns
• using nifty selection / deselection techniques to only show what you need in the graph
• creating better visualizations with colours and icons
• editing the graph straight from the Bloom interface
• creating custom search phrases for business uses and giving them near-natural language graph search capabilities.

Here's the recording:

Graphs are blooming - again!

A few weeks ago, I wrote a two part blog post about Neo4j Bloom and how I was playing around with my BeerGraph and figuring out some cool features of the new Neo4j product. You can find these posts over here

• part 1
• part 2

It included a first little demo video,

that seems to have been liked by a bunch of people :) ... thanks for that.

Podcast Interview with Oskar Hane, Neo Technology

Here's another great conversation with one of the Neo4j Engineers that is working on the coolest product since sliced bread: me and Oskar had a great conversation about his daily work on the Neo4j Browser - one of the most loved components of a very loved product. Here's out chat for you:


Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB: 00:02 Hello everybody. My name Rik, Rik Van Bruggen, from Neo Technology. Here we are recording another podcast session. Today, we have a really interesting guest, all the way from Borås in Sweden, and it's one of our developers on the Neo4j engineering team. It's Oskar Hane. Hi Oskar.

OH: 00:20 Hi Rik.

RVB: 00:21 Hey, good to have you on the podcast. Thanks for making the time.

OH: 00:25 Thanks for having me.

RVB: 00:27 It's great. Oskar, one of the reasons I was really excited to get you on the podcast was because Neo4j has this wonderful front-end tool that I use a lot, everyone uses it a lot, called the Neo4j browser. I think you're one of the guys behind that, aren't you?

OH: 00:46 Yes, since about one and a half years, I've been on that UX team, what we call it internally.

RVB: 00:54 How did you get to Neo, who are you, where did you come from, how did you get to Neo?

OH: 01:01 Actually, it's quite a funny story, I think. I was browsing Twitter two years ago, and I think that one of the guys I was following retweeted something from a guy called Emil Eifrem, send that--

RVB: 01:21 Who is that guy?

OH: 01:22 By then, I didn't know. I didn't know [anything?] at all, and he said that, "We're looking for Java developers." I was a freelance contractor by then, and I was just-- a long contract, so I was looking for Neo4j, so I sent him a tweet and said, "Don't you have any openings for JavaScript because I'm not a Java guy?" And he was like, "I think we do, actually. Talk to Magnus!", another guy inside Neo. They set up interviews. I actually have like seven or eight interviews before I joined in August of that year.

RVB: 02:16 Have you used Neo4j before or did you know about the product before, or how did you know about it?

OH: 02:22 No, I didn't, but of course, when I talked to Magnus the first time-- well, before I talked to Magnus, I downloaded and started using it. I was blown away by the user interface of the client or the Neo4j Browser compared to-- I've been working with MySQL and other databases, and their user interface--

RVB: 02:53 Is a little bit more old-fashioned?

OH: 02:55 Yeah, so I was completely blown away. I'm thinking, "Wow, I'd really like to work on this product," and I managed to get in.

RVB: 03:07 And the rest is history, right?

OH: 03:09 Yeah [chuckles].

RVB: 03:10 Nowadays, it's you and one or two other people that work on that part of Neo4j, right?

OH: 03:16 Yeah, currently, we're two. The other guy, Mark Peace sits in the London office, and in two weeks, another person is joining us, so it'll be great to have the three of us.

RVB: 03:33 What do you think is so cool about Neo4j, in general, but maybe the browser, more specifically, why do you think it's such a cool product to work on, what makes it so nice?

OH: 03:47 As you were talking a little bit that it's modern, in a way, compared to MySQL, and the browser is, you can visualize the data in a way that you're not able to visualize in a relational database, of course, an area that Neo4j or graph databases we have fixed relationships between nodes.

RVB: 04:23 The graph data model, right?

OH: 04:25 Yeah, exactly. So we have this graph visualisation in the Neo4j browser where we can run animations and have a gravity physics engine to display the data in a nice way.

RVB: 04:44 I think one of the cool things about the browser, for me as a user, is that it combines so many nice perspectives. On the one hand, it's a visualisation tool, on the other hand, it's a query troubleshooting tool, on the other hand, I have a learning tool. There's so many nice things coming together, I think. I'm assuming that was intentional.

OH: 05:09 Yeah, of course, it's sort of a platform for-- the target audience was from the beginning, at least, for developers who are writing apps for the Neo4j database, then we can use this Neo4j browser, as you say, they can see the data in many different ways. We can troubleshoot if we have any query program, so we can just run ad hoc queries to get interesting stuff, and you can learn the query language, Cypher, within the browser.

RVB: 05:50 I have off the cuff type of question for you, what's your favorite feature, if you have any? It's probably the most recent one [chuckles], but what is one of your most-- the nicest thing about the browser?

OH: 06:08 Wow, that's really a hard question. Even though it could be limited in how big graph you can do it at once, but I think the visualisation is actually my favorite because I'm basing that element that other database types that don't have, that makes us unique.

RVB: 06:37 My personal, probably, is the fact that you have this rolling history. You have this long page of query histories that you can sort of go through. I don't know if you've ever seen one of my graph karaokes but that's what I use all the time...

OH: 06:54 I have that actually, I have that karaoke [laughter].

RVB: 06:59 I'm a fan of your work, Oskar, I really am.

OH: 07:03 Thanks.

RVB: 07:05 One more thing, if you don't mind, where is this going? What does the future hold, both from the product in general, the browser, more specifically, and maybe the industry that we work in, any comments on that?

OH: 07:23 I can talk for the browser at least that we-- we're talking about having it extensible in a way that somehow that you can write like from the plugins maybe for the browser, and load in an easy way as a user. I very much like to see that, at least, that if you want to visualize your data in a special way, maybe your own [row?] or table format that only you see, you could create a front-end plugin, so to speak, just have it that way.

RVB: 08:10 So like an extension, but then part of the browser, so to speak, right?

OH: 08:14 Yeah, something like that. But we're moving some of the content out of the browser so you can bring it back in. We're heading that way.

RVB: 08:27 You also mentioned to me earlier that for future versions of Neo4j, the browser is not going to be like part of the same package as Neo4j, is that also something that's coming up then?

OH: 08:37 Well, maybe, I'm not 100% sure where we are at the decisions yet, but what we know is that, at least, we have among the files, the repository for the browser out of the Neo4j main database, but mostly, having it as a dependency. So when you download Neo4j, you get the browser inside it, just as you do now, but the code isn't mixed with the database code.

RVB: 09:08 It's easier to pull it out if we want or need to do that, right?

OH: 09:12 Yeah, exactly.

RVB: 09:13 Very cool. What about visualization, in general, is there-- there's so much stuff happening in that domain, graph visualization, it's a very hot topic, I think, how do you look at that?

OH: 09:28 Yeah, it is, and it's super hard to show visualization that are huge which has functions and elements and relationships within it. I'm very impressed by many of the actors in the industry.

RVB: 09:51 It very quickly becomes like hairball, doesn't it [chuckles]?

OH: 09:56 It can hold your web browser as well.

RVB: 10:00 Totally, there's some really cool visualization tools out there. We've been partnering with externally, so hopefully, that's complimentary, it should help us.

OH: 10:13 Definitely, we're a small team. I think our visualisation is good for some use cases, but maybe not for some.

RVB: 10:26 Well, very good. We'll wrap up the recording here, if you don't mind. We'd like to keep this podcast short and snappy. Thank you so much for coming online, Oskar, really appreciate it.

OH: 10:40 Thanks.

RVB: 10:41 I'll look forward to seeing you maybe at GraphConnect Europe or some other occasion very soon.

OH: 10:47 I definitely will be at GraphConnect Europe.

RVB: 10:50 Fantastic. I'll look forward to seeing you there. Thank you.

OH: 10:52 Likewise, thank you.

RVB: 10:53 Bye.

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All the best

Rik

What do Linkurio.us, the ICIJ and Swissleaks have in common?

That would be Neo4j.

Here's a wonderful interview that I did with Jean Villedieu, one of the founding fathers of Linkurio.us. Another great conversation, in which I learned how Linkurio.us helped the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) uncover the most important secrets of the one of the world's largest banking corporations. Super fascinating stuff. Listen here:


Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB: Hello everyone. My name is Rik and here we are again, recording another episode of our Neo4j graph database podcast. And today, we're doing another remote session with Jean Villedieu from Linkurious. Jean is in France today. I'm here in cloudy Antwerp. Welcome Jean. 

JV: Hello Rik. Thank you very much for inviting me to the podcast. 

RVB: Absolutely. Yeah. It's great. So Jean, like always, we have three parts in this podcast and I'd really like you to introduce yourself a little bit to our listeners. 

JV: Sure. My name is Jean Villedieu and I am one of the co-founders of Linkurious. At Linkurious, I'm in charge of sales and marketing and Linkurious is a French startup, based in Paris. Founded three years ago and we specialize in graph visualization. What that means is that we have software that runs on top of Neo4j and that provides Neo4j users a nice interface with which they can browse their data, explore it visually and extract information that's within their graph. 

RVB: So Linkurious is a product that people can buy, right? 

JV: Exactly. You can visit the website at http://linkurio.us where you can find more information about our products, and you can buy and download it. 

RVB: But it's also an open source part as I understand it, right? There's a part of it that's open source? 

JV: Actually, it's a good question. We recently released Linkurious.js, a graph visualization library, and it has a dual license with a open source license and a commercial one. You can find more information about that on Github and on a website which is actually going to be updated in a few days or weeks. 

RVB: Super. Well, like any open source tool, it's great that you can explore it and have the community look at the internals but at the same time, there needs to be business model for it to survive right? So, we're on the same page there. 

RVB: Jean, really the next question for me is, what attracted you guys to graphs? Why do you love graphs so much and how did you get into it? Could you give us a little bit more insight there? 

JV: Sure. So, I co-founded Linkurious with Sebastien Heymann. I'm going to talk a little bit about him and then I'll talk about myself. Sebastien has a long love story with graphs. I think he started a project called Gephi, about six or seven years ago. It's open source graph visualization program. 

RVB: That's very well-known and Gephi's, everyone uses Gephi. 

JV: Yeah, and I think he's been in love with graphs ever since. For me it has been more recent I'd say. During my studies I started using Gephi for competitive analysis reasons. I really loved it because I thought it was powerful, it was a completely new way for me to understand data, and at the same time it was very beautiful. It was very exciting to-- 

RVB: Beautiful is good … 

JV: Exactly, that's-- I'm not ashamed of that, it's one of the things that attracted me to graph, and graph visualization in the first days, and it's still something that I find exciting. I started diving into Gephi and graph visualization. I thought it was very interesting, and then I met Sebastien and had the opportunity to start Linkurio.us. Ever since, what had been very fascinating with the ongoing work at Linkurio.us, is that we get to interact with people who are innovators working with data in new ways to solve various problems in the field of financial services. In the field of security in general, in the field of health, and we get to play a very modest part in that journey by helping them understand their data and-- 

RVB: What's the most exciting case that you've had in the past couple of years? Can you give us one example maybe? 

JV: Sure, something that was very interesting for us was working with the ICIJ. It's a conglomerate of data journalist and they used Neo4j and Linkurious to explore the data from HSBC and work on important very large scale tax fraud scheme or arranged tax fraud scheme. 

RVB: Is that the case that was in the news a couple of weeks ago? 

JV: Yeah exactly. 

RVB: Oh. Wow. 

JV: And that has been discovered by combination of Neo4j and Linkurious. 

RVB: Super. I was always thinking that I could use visualizations to find new beers but you can do more than that … 

RVB: We'll switch to the next and the last question. Where do you think this is going in the next couple of years? Where is the graph space, graph data space going but also where is Linkurio.us going in the next couple of years, could you help us there a little bit? 

JV: Sure, I think graphs will still be a niche, compared to relational data basis in general, but it's a very quickly growing niche, and it's going to be very important for companies working with large volumes of data, within that more and more people are going to be interacting with graphs. It's going to be something very common in the business world and we're excited to see a new cases, new applications, almost on a daily basis. So there's bright future for graph technologies. And as a small company Linkurio.us intends to play our part in democratizing graph technologies, by offering the solution that business people - everyday business people - will use to understand their graph data. We want to be the reference for that. 

RVB: That's super. Thank you so much. It was a great talk. We're going to wrap up now. We want to keep this podcast short, and sweet. Thank you-- thanks a lot. If people want to know more about either Neo4j or Linkurio.us you can go to Neo4j.com or linkurio.us. Thank you again, Jean, and I look forward to speaking to you soon again. 

JV: Thank you very much, Rik. 

RVB: Bye. 

JV: Have a nice day.

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All the best

Rik