Projects

Crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding solutions like Threadless, Innocentive, Kaggle, and Kickstarter are transforming the creative design work, technical consulting, and venture capital. However, our empirical understanding of the processes of creativity, innovation, and decision making within these emerging socio-technical systems is sparse. Previous approaches to analyzing electronic brainstorming and group creativity have examined [...]

The NUCATS project supports Northwestern University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (NUCATS) by studying the process of research team assembly in a multi-theoretical multilevel model that examines the process of team formation and the effect of team structure on research outcomes.

The goal of the GroupScope project is to apply advanced computing applications to capture, manage, annotate and analyze these massive observational sets of video, audio, and other data. The resulting data analysis system, GroupScope, will enable breakthrough research into social interaction in large, dynamic groups to be conducted much more quickly and with much higher reliability than was previously possible.

Simple contagion processes underlie various phenomena on complex networks, such as the spread of diseases on social-contact networks and information in communication networks; understanding their dynamics and developing control mechanisms are key issues in numerous applications.

The Oncofertility project investigates how the collaboration networks of medical specialists, scientists, and scholars evolve over time and the impact of this collaboration on the emergence and development of the oncofertility scientific field.

The PetaApps project proposes to develop MTML-Sim: a Multi-Theory Multi-Level (MTML) modeling framework, operating over extremely large dynamic socio-technical networks, in which multiple contagions and behaviors are simultaneously co-evolving by repeated interactions.

The National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) PopSciGrid Community Health Portal is an evolving platform demonstrating how health behavior, policy, and demographic data can be integrated, visualized, and communicated to empower communities and support new avenues of research and policy for cancer prevention and control.

VWE is an inter-disciplinary research effort using virtual worlds such as online multi-player games as an exploratorium to theoretically extend and empirically model the dynamics of group behavior and large-scale social networks.

The goal of the VOSS project is to develop a theoretical framework to examine the socio-technical dynamics shaping the assembly of teams in virtual communities. Specifically, our theoretical framework will take into account the variety of links that exist not only among individuals, but also among documents, datasets, workflows, analytic tools, and concepts.

Grants and projects from previous years.