SONIC lab is proud to welcome Jana Diesner, who will present a talk on Thursday, Mar 07, 2013 (12:00-01:15pm) in Frances Searle Building Room 1.483 on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend.

About The Talk: From Words to Networks: Relevance of methodological choices for real-world applications

Coding texts as socio-technical networks – a process also known as relation extraction – can be used to collect network data on hard-to-access groups and organizations. This process requires people to choose appropriate methods and parameter settings. The impact of these choices on the resulting data and findings can be strong, but is hardly understood. I discuss our findings from addressing this problem:

We applied four common relation extraction methods – from fairly qualitative to fully automated (including probabilistic, machine-learning based techniques) – to large-scale, open-source corpora from the business, science and geopolitical domain, and compared the retrieved networks. I will report on common agreements and disagreements about network structure and behavior depending on the considered methods, and show how these methods can be combined to gain a more robust and comprehensive understanding of a network.

Another factor limiting the reliability of relation extraction methods is the propagation of errors throughout multi-step analysis procedures and pipelines. I will present our findings from a series of empirical experiments that we conducted to find answers to the following question: How much variation in network structure and properties is due to the error rates of the involved sub-routines? Does increasing the accuracy of these techniques actually matter for network analysis results?

About Jana Diesner

Jana Diesner is an Assistant Professor at the iSchool (a.k.a. Graduate School of Library and Information Science) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science. Jana conducts research at the nexus of network science, natural language processing and machine learning. With her work, she aims to advance the understanding and computational analysis of the interplay and co-evolution of information and socio-technical networks. She develops, analyzes and applies methods and technologies for extracting information about networks from text data and considering the substance of information for network analysis. In her empirical work, she studies networks from the business, science and geopolitical domain. She is particularly interested in covert information and covert networks. For more information see http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~jdiesner/.

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SONIC lab is proud to welcome Elena Pavan, who will present a talk on Thursday, Jan 24, 2013 (12:00-01:15pm) in Frances Searle Building Room 1.459 on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend.

About Elena Pavan
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Department of Sociology and Social Research
via Verdi 26, int. 26
38123 Trento (Italy)

e-mail: elena.pavan@unitn.it
telephone: +39 (0)461 28 1378

SONIC lab is proud to welcome Julie Birkholz, who will present a talk on Monday, Dec 17, 2012 (10:30-11:45) in Frances Searle Building Room 1.483 on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend.

About The Talk

Studies on social networks have proved that both structure and social attributes influence dynamics. Two streams of modeling exist to explain the dynamics of social networks: 1) models predicting links through network properties, and 2) models considering the effects of social attributes. In our current work we take an approach to work to overcome a number of computational limitations within these current models.We employ a mean-field model which allows for the construction of a population-specific model informed from empirical research for predicting links from both network and social properties in large social networks. The model is tested on a population of conference coauthorship behaviors of Dutch Computer Scientists, considering a number of parameters from available Web data. We prove that the mean-field model, using a data-aware approach, allows us to overcome computational burdens and thus scalability issues in modeling large social networks. A link to our current work can be found here – http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.6615.

About Julie Birkholz

Julie’s research works to comment on institutional influences on patterns of collaboration in producing research of interdisciplinary character. She specifically works to investigate the effects of institutional organizational processes on scientists’ knowledge production processes. For example, how does collaboration evolve in field of scientific practice? Using a combination of social network analysis, bibliomterics and computational social models (e.g. longitudinal actor-based network models such as ERGM),  Additionally, she is working within the Semantically Mapping Science Project (http://www.sms-project.org/) which implements the use of Web data to assess science.

Research interests include: knowledge innovation in academic networks, dynamic cooperation techniques in arising collaboration networks, and ephemeral network structures

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Mean-field approach for large social networks

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SONIC lab is proud to welcome Barend Mons, who will present a talk on Tuesday, Dec 4, 2012 (10:30-11:45) in Francis Searle Building Room 1.483 on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend.

About the talk

Barend will talk about the role of semantic technologies, (under)standards and the nanopublication ecosystem in particular. He will challenge several established views in the field of the semantic web, scholarly communication, intellectual networking, science metrics, peer review and ‘data publishing’ with an emphasis on the barriers to break down in order to allow effective data exposure, sharing and integration in the Big Data era. The context of his talk will be the need for eScience approaches to ‘in silico’ knowledge discovery.

About Barend Mons

Barend Mons (born The Hague, The Netherlands in 1957, PhD in 1986 at Leiden University, in The Netherlands) is a molecular biologist who turned to bioinformatics in 2000 after a decade of research on the genetic differentiation of malaria parasites, and five years of science management at the Research Directorate of the European Commission and the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research. He is the initiator of WikiProfessional and an inventor of the Knowlet technology. In 2008 he was one of the driving forces behind the Concept Web Alliance, in close collaboration with (a.o.) Jan Velterop, Mark Musen, Amos Bairoch. In 2000 he founded Collexis and in 2005, he co-founded Knewco, Inc.

Since 2002 he has been Associate Professor in Biosemantics at the Department of Medical Informatics, Erasmus Medical Centre, University of Rotterdam and (since 2005) at the Department of Human Genetics at the Leiden University Medical Centre, both in The Netherlands. Mons published over 70 peer reviewed articles, holds three patents in semantic technology and is a regular keynote speaker at international conferences.

As of 2010 he is a Scientific Director of the Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC), whilst retaining his academic affiliations with Leiden University Medical Centre and Erasmus Medical Centre. In 2012 Barend has been appointed as professor in Biosemantics at the Leiden University Medical Center. The chair is established by the Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC).

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