SONIC lab member Ryan Whalen will present a talk at the Argonne National Laboratory LANS seminar series this afternoon.  The talk, titled "Legal Complexity: Measuring complexity within the Supreme Court precedent network and predicting network growth" explores using network analytic techniques to help us better understand legal system development.

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. ...

We are very pleased to welcome Prof. Michelle Shumate as a faculty affiliate of the SONIC research group. Prof. Shumate, who is currently at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will join the faculty at Northwestern University in fall 2012.

SONIC Lab members Lindsay Young, Brooke Foucault and Noshir Contractor will attend the 4th International Workshop on Network Theory jointly organized by the Annenberg Network of Networks (ANN) and SONIC Workshop on April 26-28 at the University of Southern California. The theme this year is on “Social Movements and Network Theory.” Information and many excellent presentation videos from last year's Network Theory Conference are available here: http://sonic.northwestern.edu/news/events/webnetsciworkshop/ Check them out to discover what exciting science is motivating these three.

Contractor to deliver plenary address at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) International Conference on Data Mining in Anaheim on April 26, 2012. SIAM is a world renowned society whose mission is to build cooperation between mathematics and the worlds of science and technology through their publications, research, and community.   For more information go to: http://www.siam.org/meetings/sdm12/contractor.php

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 ...

Prof. Roger Leenders from the Netherlands is visiting the SONIC lab for the entire Spring Quarter (and a few weeks beyond). Roger Leenders is Professor of Intra-Organizational Networks at Tilburg University. His research mainly focuses on the antecedents and consequences of networks in and of teams. A core research theme is the creativity of teams: what are the network drivers (and inhibitors) of the creative performance of teams? Before moving to Tilburg, Roger was Professor of Networks in Market and Product Innovation at the University of Groningen. ...

Dominic DiFranzo, PhD Student in the Department of Computer Science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Insititute is visiting the SONIC lab. Dominic works with Prof. James A. Hendler and Prof. Deborah L. McGuinness  in the Tetherless World Constellation research group. Dominic's research focuses on the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. During his visit Dominic will work on projects related to Virtual Worlds and the Semantic Web.

Contractor to deliver a keynote titled “Some Assembly Required: Organizing in the 21st Century” on April 5, 2012 as part of the Crossroads Seminar Series at George Washington University. For more information go to http://departments.columbian.gwu.edu/orgsci/newsevents/crossroads

Contractor presented a talk titled “Some assembly required” Organizing in the 21st century” at the UC Davis Clinical and Translational Science Center’s Translational Science Seminar on March 21, 2012. More information can be found here: http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/ctsc/