Nebula was selected as a finalist for the IMS Global Consortium Learning Impact Award that was held on May 16-19 2017. Most of the competition was professional educational tech applications. See the full list of Winners of the 2017 Learning Impact Awards here, where Nebula is listed among the 2017 Honorable Mentions.

Congratulations to Jackie Ng and Noshir Contractor – SONIC contributors to Nebula!

Nebula is a Northwestern alternative to the standard Canvas discussion board.  Nebula is a hybrid type of learning tool that at once offers analytic visualization of complex discussion dynamics and invites participation in that dynamic by having users contribute posts and comments directly to the discussion graph. Its visual approach is very intuitive to understand and use, promoting more rapid and frequent student engagement in the discussions.

Noshir Contractor and two SONIC graduate students: Diego Gomez Zara, and Zachary Gibson are going to present at the 67th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) on May 25-29 in San Diego, CA.

One of the papers, co-authored by Noshir Contractor, will be presented at the Top Paper Panel for the Organizational Communication Division:

On May 18, 2017 SONIC Director Noshir Contractor gave a Gerald P. Mohrmann Memorial Lecture on Leveraging Computational Social Science to Address Grand Societal Challenges.

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 in the area of networks, Contractor will argue that Computational Social Science serves as the foundation to unleash the intellectual insights locked in big data. More importantly, he will illustrate how these insights offer social scientists in general, and social network scholars in particular, an unprecedented opportunity to engage more actively in monitoring, anticipating and designing interventions to address grand societal challenges.

On Friday, April 28th, Noshir and Leslie presented a paper Exploring New Frontiers: Building Better Teams on Earth and Beyond in a symposium at the 2017 SIOP conference in Orlando, Florida.

Jacqueline Ng, Brennan Antone, Zachary Gibson, Suzanne T. Bell, Leslie A. DeChurch, Noshir Contractor: Crew Recommender for Effective Work in Space: CREWS

We welcome back Noshir Contractor to the Northwestern University campus after spending the 2017 Winter Quarter as the Distinguished WTO Visiting Scholar at the Center for Work, Technology, & Organizations (WTO) in the Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University’s School of Engineering. For more details, please see here.

“Teaming at the Limit: Enhancing Team Effectiveness with Enterprise Social Media Affordances”, a paper written by SONIC lab member, Jackie Ng, in collaboration with Noshir Contractor, Paul Leonardi & Leslie DeChurch, was judged to be one of the best accepted papers (top 10%) in the 2017 Academy of Management Meeting taking place in Atlanta Georgia, August 4-8. This high honor entitles the paper to be published in the Proceedings of the 2017 AoM Meeting.

Currently, Brennan is working in SONIC as an undergraduate research assistant. He is an invaluable member of the CREWS project team.

Brennan will be entering the PhD program in Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences at Northwestern University in Fall 2017, and will continue to work with SONIC in his new role. He is the recipient of a Harold Richards Graduate Fellowship for researchers in organization theory and systems analysis. Congratulations to Brennan!