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. Our work is aimed at developing news and media information technologies that provide explicit and visible editorial control, at scale. Some of our most exciting work in this area is aimed at automatically generating stories from data. A system based on this technology is already generating more than 10 thousand stories weekly in areas ranging from sports, to business, to politics. This system is the nation’s most prolific and published author of, among other things, women’s collegiate softball stories. The stories compare favorably to those written by human beings.

Larry Birnbaum received his PhD in computer science from Yale University in 1986, and joined the Northwestern faculty in 1989. His research in artificial intelligence and computer science has encompassed natural language processing, case-based reasoning, machine learning, human-computer interaction, educational software, and computer vision. Birnbaum has authored or coauthored more than eighty articles. He was the program co-chair of the 1991 International Machine Learning Workshop and has been a member of the program committee for numerous other conferences and workshops.

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 of “tech-bloggers”, Tim will show that
this uncertain knowledge is refracted by social media into semantic networks that
demonstrate the emergence of meaning structures.

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 other hand, if such power affirmations conflict with people’s more stable status characteristics, this could create tension. These hypotheses were tested experimentally by priming people at varying levels of status with power
(high/low) and social change (significant/none) and asking them to recall their social networks. Results suggest that stable, confirmed identities, and not feelings of power, are the foundation from which people can exhibit greater network responsiveness.

About Ned Smith
Ned Smith is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business prior to joining the faculty at Ross in 2010. His research focuses on the construction and consequences of organizational identity, with an emphasis on financial markets. He draws on sociological and network theories to develop and test new identity-based models of organizational behavior and investor decision-making. He also studies how people mentally construct their social worlds -i.e., their social networks- according to situational and environmental variations. Ned’s research has been published or is forthcoming in leading journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Management Science, and Organization Science.

The flyer for the talk can be downloaded here.

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 research on bullying for 18 years and more recently has examined correlates of sexual harassment, dating violence, and homophobic teasing. As a result, she presents regularly at regional, national, and international conferences and is author on over 90 professional publications. She is co-editor of four published books including “Bullying in North American Schools: A Social-Ecological Perspective on Prevention and Intervention” and “International Handbook of Bullying.” She has presented thousands of workshops and in-service training seminars for teachers, administrators, counselors, and social workers across the U.S. Her research focuses on translating empirical findings into prevention and intervention programming. Dr. Espelage has appeared on many television news and talk shows, including The Today Show; CNN; CBS Evening News; and The Oprah Winfrey Show, Anderson Cooper 360, and Anderson and has been quoted in the national print press, including Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, USA Today, and People magazine.

Understanding Adolescent Bullying Attitudes and Behaviors Through Social Network Analysis

Creativity of Teams

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 and Communication, Communication & Society, Fields Methods and elsewhere. His tool for downloading Facebook networks (namegenweb) is used worldwide. His 2009 dissertation under Barry Wellman at the University of Toronto won best Dissertation from ICA’s Communivation and Technology Section.

Download the flyer here.

Personal Networks and the Rise of the Real Name Web