My Dream Team

This project is funded by the Northwestern University Office of Provost, the NSF Grants: CNS-1010904, OCI-0904356, IIS-0838564, SBE-1063901, UL1RR024146-06S2, NIH CTSA award UL1RR025741, 5UL1RR025741-04S3, 14811/HR001118C0022, Army Research Laboratory under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-09-2-0053, BCS-0940851.

My DreamTeam is a web-based platform to facilitate the assembly of teams. Participants first complete a profile and then search the platform to help assemble their Dream Team

My Dream Team has been developed and built by the SONIC Research Group at Northwestern University in close collaboration with the ATLAS lab of the Northwestern University (formerly DELTA Lab at Georgia Tech). The purpose of this tool is to help form teams of experts. Some of the latest deployments of this project have been in a class setting where students were asked to form teams based on their preferences for a team member.

My Dream Team uses preference matching and network heuristics to provide recommendations for team assembly and is based on ongoing research in the two labs. SONIC has been at the forefront of developing a suite of heuristics for recommending collaborations between researchers in the past. We use some of the same network heuristics like ‘Friend of a Friend’ and ‘Birds of a Feather’ to help form teams.

We envision My Dream Team to be a one-­stop destination for forming teams and hence we are in the early stages of incorporating some key features like messaging services, profile search engine, and profile editors to give our users a satisfactory experience of forming teams with ease.

Visit the “MyDreamTeam” website.

Introduction to MyDreamTeam:

How to administer MyDream Team:

Research Team:

Investigators:

SONIC Team Members

Developers:

Past Researchers: 

Gómez-Zará, D., Guo, M., DeChurch, L. A., & Contractor, N. S. (2020). The impact of displaying diversity information on the formation of self-assembling teams. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2020), April 25–30, 2019, Hawaii, USA.

Ichhaporia, R., Gómez-Zará, D., DeChurch, L., & Contractor, N. (2020). A Network Approach to the Formation of Self-assembled Teams. Complex Networks and Their Applications VIII, 969–981. Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-36683-4_77

Góméz-Zará, D., Ichhaporia, R., DeChurch, L. A., & Contractor, N. S. (2020, September 25-27). Do I know you? The effects of social capital on self-assembled teams [Poster presentation]. Virtual Organizational Communication Mini-Conference [OCMC]

Harris, A. M., Gómez-Zará, D., DeChurch, L. A., & Contractor, N. S. (2019). Joining together online: The trajectory of CSCW scholarship on group formation. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., 3(CSCW), 27. doi:10.1145/3359250

Gómez-Zará, D., Andreoli, S., DeChurch, L. A., & Contractor, N. S. (2019). Discovering collaborators online: Assembling interdisciplinary teams online at an Argentinian UniversityCuadernos.Info, (44), 21-41. doi.org/10.7764/cdi.44.1575

Gómez-Zará, D., Paras, M., Twyman, M., Lane, J. N., DeChurch, L. A., & Contractor, N. S. (2019). Who Would You Like to Work With?. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Glasgow, UK.

Gómez-Zará, D., Ng, J., Andreoli, S., Twyman, M., DeChurch, L., Contractor, N. (2018, October). Social cognition and team self-assembly: Competence, warmth, or embeddedness. Using team recommender systems to understand what people look for in their teammates. Paper presented at 13th Annual INGRoup Conference, Bethesda, USA. [Slides]

Gómez-Zará, D., & Contractor, N. (2018, April). How can we assemble better interdisciplinary teams? The “My Dream Team” experience at CITEP Lab. Presentation at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. [Slides in Spanish]

Gómez-Zará, D., Ng, J., Twyman, M., DeChurch, L., Contractor, N. (2018, March). Social Cognition and Team Assembly: Competence, Warmth, or Embeddedness. Presentation at the ATLAS’ Teams Research Incubator Weekend, Evanston, IL, USA.

Gómez-Zará, D., Ng, J., Twyman, M., Andreoli, S., DeChurch, L., Contractor, N. (2018, July). Social Cognition and Team Assembly: Competence, Warmth, or Embeddedness. Presentation at the 13th Annual INGRoup Conference, Washington D.C., MD, USA.

Gómez-Zará, D., Ng, J., Andreoli, S., DeChurch, L., Contractor, N. (2017, October). Facilitating Effective Team Assembly: Leveraging Recommender Systems to Enable Successful Multidisciplinary Research Collaborations. Poster presented at the Organizational Communication Mini Conference, Athens, Ohio, USA.

Gómez-Zará, D., & Contractor, N. (2017, August). Entorno My Dream Team (MDT). Sistemas de recomendación y análisis de redes. Presentation at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Twyman, M., Newman, D., DeChurch, L., & Contractor, N. (2016, July). The Ties that Form Teams: Self-Organization, Homophily, and Multiplexity. Paper presented at 11th Annual INGRoup Conference, Helsinki, Finland.
*Runner-up: “Best Student Paper” Award

Twyman, M., DeChurch, L. & Contractor, N. (2016, April). The Impact of Homophily and Multiplex Networks on the Assembly of Teams. Poster presented at the Sunbelt XXXVI Conference, International Network for Social Network Analysis, Newport Beach, CA.

Twyman, M., Wax, A., DeChurch, L., & Contractor, N. (2015, July). Looking for Leadership: Understanding Team Assembly in a Web Technology. In A. Wax and M. Twyman (co-chairs), Technologies for Studying and Enabling Teams. Symposium conducted at the 10th Annual INGRoup Conference, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Asencio, R., Huang, Y., DeChurch, L., Contractor, N., Sawant, A., & Murase, T. (2015, July). The MyDreamTeam Builder: A Recommender System for Assembling & Enabling Effective Teams. Poster presented at the Interdisciplinary Network Conference for Group Research (INGRoup) Annual Conference, Pittsburgh, PA.
*Best Poster Award

Twyman, M., Wax, A., DeChurch, L., & Contractor, N. (2015, June). Emergence of Assembly & Leadership Networks in Teams. Poster presented at the NetSci 2015 International School and Conference on Network Science, Zaragoza, Spain.