SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Northwestern Prof. Larry Birnbaum, who will present a talk titled "From Contextual Search to Automatic Content Generation: Scaling Human Editorial Judgment" on Monday May 21st from 11:00am-12:00pm in Frances Searle Building, Room 1.421 on Northwestern's Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend. Systems that present people with information inescapably make editorial judgments in determining what information to show and how to show it. However the editorial values used to make these judgments are generally invisible to users and in many cases even to the engineers who design them. ...

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Duke University PhD candidate Catherine Shea. She will present her findings in a talk titled "Motivation as an Antecedent to Social Network Structure". The talk will be on May 7th from 11:00am-12:30pm in Frances Searle Building, Room 1.421 on Northwestern's Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend. Catherine is interested in experimental methods in social network research and has presented her research at various conferences and universities around the world. She received her Master of Science from Queen's University, Canada and was a visiting scholar in the University ...

Claudia Wagner will present as a part of the SONIC Speaker Series on Monday, April 2nd. The talk is titled "Extracting Semantics from User Generated Data" and will be from 2:00pm-3:00pm in Room 1441 of the Frances Searle Building on Northwestern's Evanston Campus. Claudia is currently a research assistant and PhD student at Graz University in Austria.

Dr. Tanya Menon will be presenting as part of the SONIC Speaker serieson Monday, March 19 at 11:00 am in Frances Searle, Room 1.483.  Dr. Menon is a Visiting Associate Professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, and previously, Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Booth Business School. She studies knowledge transfers in organizations, focusing on crosscultural differences and organizational learning. In her upcoming talk, Dr. Menon will talk about The Social Structure of Dishonesty: the reciprocal relationship between dishonesty and network activation.  This talk establishes the ...

Tim Hannigan will be presenting a SONIC speaker series talk at 2:30pm on February 27th in room 1-421 of the Frances Searle Building. Tim is a Doctoral Candidate at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. In his upcoming talk, Tim will focus on his research on the evolution of product ontologies. As cognitive representations packaging up product attributes, use-cases and buyer characteristics, these knowledge structures become embedded as market categories. This talk will show that the fuzzy-front end of a product market is marked by ambiguity and uncertainty around definitions and concepts that appear in the form of rumour. Using a computer-aided text analysis on discourse ...

On Monday, February 6, from 9:30-11:00 a.m. Dr. Edward (Ned) Smith will be giving a presentation in room 1-483 of the Frances Searle Building on the Northwestern University Evanston Campus. The talk is entitled "Identity and Network Activation". About the talk In his talk Ned will focus on his research on Identity and Network Activation. Using a dynamic cognitive model of network activation, Ned and his colleagues experimentally test two com peting hypotheses on the link between identity and network activation. On one hand, affirming people’s power might enable agency. On the ...

On Friday, December 2, from 2:15-3:30 p.m. Dr. Griffin M Weber will be giving a presentation in room 1-421 of Frances Searle Building on the Northwestern University Evanston Campus. The talk is entitled "Social Network Analysis Using Harvard Catalyst Profiles". Harvard Catalyst Profiles is an open source, ontology based, research networking software platform that creates research profiles for an institution’s faculty, and links these together through both Passive Networks, which are automatically generated based on information known about investigators, and Active Networks, which users themselves create by indicating their ...

On Monday, November 21, from 2:00-3:30 p.m. Prof. Dorothy Espelage will be giving a presentation in Room 2-107 of Frances Searle Building on the Northwestern University Evanston Campus. The talk is entitled "Understanding Adolescent Bullying Attitudes and Behaviors Through Social Network Analysis". Dorothy L. Espelage, Ph.D., is a Professor of Child Development and Associate Chair in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a University Scholar and has fellow status in Division 17 (Counseling Psychology) of the American Psychological Association. She has conducted ...

On Thursday, October 27, from 1:00-2:00 p.m. Prof. Dr. Roger Leenders will be giving a presentation in Room 1-483 of Frances Searle Building on the Northwestern University Evanston Campus. The talk is entitled "Competition and the Gender of Team Creativity". The presentation reports on several studies on the effect of interteam competition on the creativity of teams. In particular, a recent study proposing that having groups go head-to-head is stimulating to the creativity of groups composed of men but detrimental to the creativity of groups composed ...

On Friday, October 21, from 2:00-3:00 p.m. University of Oxford Research Fellow, Bernie Hogan will be giving a presentation in Room 1-483 of Frances Searle Building on the Northwestern University Evanston Campus. This presentation will provide an overview of several studies that explore the phenomena related to how social networks mirror offline networks, albeit not perfectly. Bernie Hogan is a research fellow at the University of Oxford's Internet Institute. His work focuses on online identity via real names and pseudonyms. He has published methods for analyzing networks and names in City ...