Noshir Contractor Gives Keynote Address at 2016 Web Science Summer School in Koblenz, Germany

Noshir Contractor gave a keynote address at the 2016 annual Web Science Summer School held in Koblenz, Germany. Click here for the event page and click here to download slides from the presentation.

Abstract:

The increased access to big data about social phenomena in general, and network data in particular, has been a windfall for social scientists. But these exciting opportunities must be accompanied with careful reflection on how big data can motivate new theories and methods. Using examples of his research, Contractor will argue that Web/Internet/Network Sciences (WINS) serve as the foundation to unleash the intellectual insights locked in big data. More importantly, he will illustrate how these insights offer social scientists an unprecedented opportunity to engage more actively in monitoring, anticipating and designing interventions to address grand societal challenges.koblenz

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Noshir Contactor Meets with Fellow Web Science Trust Lab Directors in Germany

WSTNet Lab Directors got together at the start of the Web Science Conference this week in Hannover, Germany. Highlights of the meeting include the election of Steffen Staab as Chair and Pete Burnap as Vice-Chair, planning for this years’ Web Science Summer School at University of Koblenz (30 June to 6 July – ), and firming up of arrangements for World Wide Web Week – a global event celebrating 10 years of Web Science to be held later this year.

Read the full article here.

Lab Director, Noshir Contractor, is a founding member of the Web Science Trust initiative.

WST Lab Directors

 

 

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Noshir Contractor Gives Keynote Address at the University of Colorado, Denver’s 4th Annual Network Leadership Training Academy

Noshir Contractor gave the keynote address at the University of Colorado, Denver’s 4th Annual Network Leadership Training Academy, titled  “Building and Leveraging Powerful Social Networks”. Click here for a link to the event page.

Description:
The Network Leadership Training Academy (NLTA) is a place where network leaders gather to learn, share ideas, and develop skills for engaging in the “network way of working.” This 3-day workshop, hosted by the University of Colorado Denver’s Center on Collaborative Governance, is focused on building, managing, and evaluating effective networks. Many people today are deeply involved in the network way of working, but are struggling to find tools and a place to build skills and a community for this new way of connecting across boundaries. This interactive workshop is based on the premise that everyone involved in a network requires network leadership skills in order to be an active, effective member of a collaborative network. he agenda for the 2016 NLTA is packed full of opportunities for attendees to share and learn from each other’s experiences and skills, as well as research and tools to translate back to practice. Our keynote address on Building and Leveraging Powerful Social Networks features Dr. Noshir Contractor, Professor at Northwestern University and Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research center. He will share his work on investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in a wide variety of contexts. Large group sessions will be led by NLTA core trainers who are recognized for their contributions to network science research. Session topics include: · Managing Networks, Brint Milward, Ph.D, University of Arizona · Network Way of Working: Building a Network Culture, Janice Popp, MSW, RSW, University of Calgary · Affective Contagion in Networks: Evaluating Process Quality, Darrin Hicks, PhD, University of Denver · Evaluating Networks as Systems, Danielle Varda, PhD, University of Colorado Denver Other session topics include: Networks 101, Using PARTNER’s Social Network Analysis Tool to Evaluate your Networks, Networks as Policy Tools: “Network Nuggets” from Research and Practice, Facilitation Skills, Conflict Training, and Collective Impact.

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SONIC Receives Yet Another NASA Grant!

Noshir Contractor along with collaborators Suzanne Bell (DePaul University) and Leslie DeChurch (currently at Georgia Tech, but soon to be at Northwestern University) have received another grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in order to study the relationship between composition, interpersonal relations, and team effectiveness in space crews. This project will be jointly conducted with researchers at Institute of Biomedical Problems, whose research informs operations for the Russian Federal Space Agency. In this US-Russian collaboration, researchers will utilize data previously collected in the Mars 105 and Mars 500 simulations; collect new data using analog-definition research in the 2017 and 2018 Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) campaigns; and use a novel combination of text mining, relational event modeling, and coevolution statistical modeling.

For more information on this exciting new project, click here.

This is the second collaborative NASA grant among Prof. Contractor, Prof. DeChurch, and Prof. Bell; the first being CREWS: Crew Recommender for Effective Work in Space. This is also the fourth NASA grant the SONIC Lab has received in the past two years. Be sure to check out our work on the other two grants: SCALE and INERTIA!

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Cutting costs: Sustainability matters even in complex networks

A team of researchers at Northeastern University, led by famous networks researcher and physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, explored how the concept of sustainability can be implemented in network analysis. The researchers approached this idea by defining the concept of control energy or “the amount of effort needed to control real-world complex systems.” They reported that this new metric can be utilized in all kinds of real-world complex systems, such as identifying critical points in online network security systems. By using this new metric, a cost benefit analysis could be administered in order to identify exactly how much external energy needs to be inputted into drivers’ nodes in order to create the most efficient complex system.

Read the full article in Science Daily here.

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SONIC Speaker Series Presents: Robert Ackland

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Robert Ackland who will present his talk on Tuesday, April 10th, 2016 at 9:00 AM in Frances Searle Building, Room 3-417. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Ackland please schedule a time HERE.  Join our Facebook Event HERE.

Please contact Eric Forbush with any questions or comments.

Frames and Fields on Twitter

Associate Professor School of Sociology Centre for Social Research & Methods ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
Associate Professor School of Sociology Centre for Social Research & Methods
ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences

Abstract

We characterize an online activist field as a social arena in which participants vie for the definition of the most urgent cause or risk issue. We ask the question: to what extent is it conceptually and empirical valid to regard protest activity on Twitter, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, as an online activist field? Network analysis is used to examine two core aspects of field theory: the behavior of incumbents vs new entrants in response to a new issue or frame, and the dynamics of field formation. This project extends earlier research concerning organizations involved in environmental social movements and online collective identity formation and contributes to emerging research on activism in the era of the “networked individual”.

Biography 

Robert Ackland is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Sociology and the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University. He has degrees in economics from the University of Melbourne, Yale University and the ANU, where he gained his PhD on index number theory in the context of cross-country comparisons of income and inequality in 2001, and he has worked as an economist at the Australian Department of Immigration and the World Bank. Since 2002 Robert has been conducting quantitative research into online social and organizational networks, and his research has appeared in journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Social Networks, Computational Economics, Social Science Computer Review, and the Journal of Social Structure. He leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks Lab and he created the VOSON software for hyperlink network construction and analysis, which has been publicly available since 2006 and is used by researchers worldwide. Robert established the Social Science of the Internet specialization in the ANU’s Master of Social Research in 2008, and his book Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (SAGE) was published in 2013. Robert has been chief investigator on five Australian Research Council grants and in 2007, he was a UK National Centre for e-Social Science Visiting Fellow and James Martin Visiting Fellow based at the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2011, he was appointed to the Science Council of the Web Foundation’s Web Index project and he recently contributed a background paper to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends.

More information can be found at Robert’s website: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/ackland-rj

Stream the full presentation here:

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SONIC Speaker Series Presents: Corinne Coen

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Corinne Coen who will present a talk on Tuesday, March 29th, 2016 at 9:00 AM in Frances Searle Building, Room 1-483. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Coen please schedule a time HERE. Please contact Meghan McCarter with any questions or comments.

Associate Professor, Organizational Behavior, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western University
Associate Professor, Organizational Behavior, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western University

The New Foundations: Emergence, Constructionism and the New Reductionism

Abstract

The science of studying emergence is not well understood among organizational scholars.  Scholars often transfer assumptions from variance analysis to this particular application of process analysis.  Further, its components parts—emerging, emergent outcomes and their properties—are often confounded leading to muddled thinking.  In this paper, I distinguish among these components.  Specifically, I discuss the features of complex systems drawing out distinctions between complex vs complicated non-linear systems, constituting vs causing, aggregation, levels, and holism.  I draw out the implications of this research approach, emphasizing the paradigm shift required to apply it from other approaches, using examples from organization studies, particularly the Strategy Microfoundations debate.

Biography 

Corinne Coen is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Weatherhead School of Management in Case Western Reserve University where she holds the Lewis Progressive Fellowship and is the Chair of the Faculty Council. She has an MBA from University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Michigan. Her research interests focus on the dynamics of work teams as they generate cooperation and competition, cohesion, and sub-groups.  In the pursuit of understanding these dynamic processes, Corinne has special expertise in agent-based modeling and the study of cross-level emergence.  Her work has been published in Organizational Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory and Simulation Modeling Practice and Theory.

Stream the full presentation here:

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Jackie Ng Wins First Place in the Northwestern University Computational Research Day Visualization Challenge

SONIC PhD student Jackie Ng took home the gold in the Northwestern University Computational Research Day Visualization Challenge for her presentation on Nebula, an innovative new tool that uses network science to visualize discussion board threads. For winning first place, Jackie received an NVIDIA GeForce Titan X graphics card which retails for over $1,000!

Congratulations Jackie!

Jackie thumbnail

nvidia

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En el marco del Programa La UBA para el Siglo XXI, comienza el ciclo de actividades con motivo del 30º aniversario de la creación del Programa de Educación a Distancia UBAXXI, con la conferencia “Potenciando la Ciencia de Redes para abordar los grandes retos sociales”, a cargo del Prof. Noshir Contractor.

El acceso a grandes volúmenes de información sobre los fenómenos sociales en general y sobre la red en particular tiene un valor extraordinario para los científicos sociales. Pero esta apasionante oportunidad debe estar acompañada de la reflexión sobre cómo los big data pueden dar lugar a nuevas teorías y métodos. Utilizando ejemplos de su investigación en el área de redes, Contractor analizará el aporte de la Ciencia de Redes al desarrollo de nuevas comprensiones a partir de grandes volúmenes de datos. Más importante aún, ilustrará cómo estas ideas ofrecen a los científicos sociales y los estudiosos de redes sociales, una oportunidad sin precedentes para participar más activamente en la supervisión, la anticipación y el diseño de intervenciones para hacer frente a los grandes desafíos sociales. – See more at: http://citep.rec.uba.ar/blog/2016/04/20/2398/#sthash.b8XUhK7X.dpuf

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La conferencia se realizará el miércoles 27 de abril a las 18 hs. en Pte. J. E. Uriburu 950, entrepiso.

No se requiere inscripción previa para participar de la actividad.

Para más información, ingresar en: http://programasiglo21.rec.uba.ar

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Indian Monsoon: Novel approach allows early forecasting

Scientists from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research used network analysis to predict Indian monsoon timing more accurately and significantly earlier. The new predictions will help farmers in the region decide when to plant their crops. As co-author Jürgen Kurths explains, “On Facebook or Twitter, you can follow how news is spreading, one posting leading to many others. In the climate system, not people but geographical regions are communicating — admittedly in a quite complex way.” The key part of the analysis was identifying regions that illustrate important warning signals and analyzing their interaction with other regions.

indian monsoon

Read the full article here

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