Noshir Contractor is attending the 2017 IEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) in Sydney, Australia.

A paper, co-authored by Noshir is being presented at the conference:

Li, Y., Sun, Y., & Contractor, N. (2017, August). Graph mining assisted semi-supervised learning for fraudulent cash-out detection.

On July 20-22, SONIC doctoral candidate Jackie Ng, SONIC alumna visiting researcher Julija Mell, and ATLAS doctoral students Ashley Niler and Lindsay Larson will present at the 12th Annual INGRoup Conference, held in Saint Louis, Missouri.

You can see their talks’ details by following the link to INGRoup 2017 Presentations.

Noshir Contractor is a panelist on “Sources of Data for Capturing Group Processes and Emergence” at 2017 INGRoup Doctoral Consortium, held on July 20th.

This July 10-13 Noshir is attending the 3rd International Conference on Computational Social Science, IC²S² 2017 in Cologne, Germany.  He is on the organizing committee of this conference and is also one of the four chairs.

On Wednesday, July 12 Pj Lamberson presents a paper co-authored with Noshir, John Lang, Leslie DeChurch, Brian Uzzi in a Session on Collaboration and Communities. The title of the talk is “Sharing Strategies: Optimal networks for team collaboration and problem solving.”

#IC2S2

We are very excited to receive a new grant from NASA, on which SONIC’s Noshir Contractor is a Co-Investigator.

Project FUSION: Facilitating Unified Systems of Interdependent Organizational Networks

Project FUSION was among seven proposals, selected by NASA’s Human Research Program to help answer questions about astronaut health and performance during future long-duration missions beyond low-Earth orbit. These proposals will investigate the impact of the space environment on various aspects of astronaut health, including behavioral health and performance, cardiovascular alterations, human factors and radiation effects. All of the selected projects will contribute to NASA’s long-term plans for deep space exploration, including to Mars.

Project Team: Dorothy Carter, University of Georgia (PI), Marissa Shuffler, Clemson University (Co-I), Leslie DeChurch, Northwestern (Co-I), Noshir Contractor, Northwestern (Co-I), Aaron Schecter, University of Georgia  (Co-I), Shawn Burke, University of Central Florida (Consultant), Stephen Zaccaro, George Mason University (Consultant), & Lauren Landon, Wyle Laboratories, Inc. (Consultant)

Sending a team of humans to Mars will require extreme forms of teamwork across complex “Multiteam Systems” comprised of multiple teams that are separated by unprecedented degrees of space and time (e.g., mission control teams, spaceflight crews). In “Project FUSION: Facilitating Unified Systems of Interdependent Organizational Networks” we will combine findings from qualitative research with NASA personnel, agent-based computational models, and laboratory studies at The University of Georgia, Northwestern University, and NASA analog environments to uncover the drivers of crucial psycho-social teamwork relationships, such as trust, influence, and shared understanding, within and across teams in Spaceflight Multiteam Systems. Based on this program of research, we will develop and deliver countermeasures, including training and debriefing protocols, to help NASA prepare for and monitor multiteam collaboration throughout long-duration space exploration missions.

Noshir Contractor gave a plenary talk in a session titled “Organizing and Organizations” at the Collective Intelligence Conference. CI is the fifth annual interdisciplinary conference dedicated to advancing our understanding of collective intelligence and the workings of groups. The conference took place at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering in Brooklyn, NY, on June 15-16, 2017.

Noshir Contractor was a lead facilitator of a workshop at the Science of Team Science (SciTS) Conference in Clearwater Beach, FL, held on June 12-14, 2017.

Network Perspectives to Understand and Enable Team Science 

Description: In this workshop, attendees will be introduced to the basics of social network theories, methods, and tools.   They will come away with an improved understanding of the various forms of networks necessary for effective scientific collaborations.  This workshop is organized into three distinct parts.  (1) The first part provides an historical overview of the motivations to view team science from a social networks perspective. This first part will conclude with a brief introduction to the concepts of social networks, cognitive social networks, knowledge networks, cognitive knowledge networks and their relevance to team science. (2) The second part focuses on using network metrics to describe team science.  This part begins by defining various concepts used in network analysis: actors and attributes of actors, relations and properties of relations as well as two-mode networks. Next it describes various how these concepts influence strategies for the collection of network data. The session then defines and describes how various common network metrics are computed and interpreted at the actor, dyadic, triadic, sub-group, and component level. (3) The third part of the workshop addresses using network models to understand and enable team science. Here, a multi-theoretical multilevel (MTML) model is outlined to help stakeholders understand the dynamics for creating, maintaining, dissolving, and reconstituting social and knowledge networks in scientific communities. The session will provide a high level overview of statistical techniques to test MTML models of team science. Research exemplars are presented to illustrate the potential of the MTML framework to understand and enable team science. The session concludes with a demonstration of how these insights are being used to develop recommender systems for assembling effective scientific teams.

One of the SONIC papers, presented at the 67th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) on May 25-29 in San Diego, CA., received a Top 4 Paper Award in the Organizational Communication Division.

Fu, Sophia, Shumate, Michelle, & Contractor, Noshir. Collective Innovation Adoption across Interorganizational Systems: Organizational Boundary, Social Networks, and Decision-Making Status.