On September 9, 2016 Noshir Contractor presented at the Department of Computer Science and Automation Seminar Series at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India. He spoke on the topic of Leveraging Computational Social Science to Address Grand Societal Challenges.
Runner-up: “Best Student Paper” Award
Congratulations to a SONIC graduate student Marlon Twyman who received a Runner-up: “Best Student Paper” Award at the INGRoup 2016 conference for this presentation:
Marlon Twyman, Dan Newman, Leslie DeChurch, and Noshir Contractor. The Ties that Form Teams: Self-Organization, Homophily, and Multiplexity. 11th Annual INGRoup Conference, Helsinki, Finland , July 14-16, 2016.
Abstract:
This paper explains the unfolding process of team assembly – the behaviors involved as individuals consider and form relationships with potential teammates. We explore the role of self-organizing principles, homophily, and multiplexity in explaining how individuals choose their collaborators. Findings reveal multiplexity is a stronger predictor of team assembly than homophily.
SONIC and NU-Delta members presented at the INGRoup conference on July 14-16 in Helsinki, Finland
SONIC and NU-Delta members presented at the INGRoup conference on July 14-16 in Helsinki, Finland.
Abstracts for posters and presentations are listed below the schedule.
Gender Composition Affects Females Experience of Working in Science Teams
Ashley Niler, Raquel Asencio, Leslie DeChurch, Brian Uzzi, Noshir Contractor
Success in scientific fields hinges on effective collaboration. Whereas females excel in communal settings, they are underrepresented in scientific fields, and on science teams. We find the percentage of females on a team affects females’ level of team identification and collective efficacy, and subsequently team performance.
The Newcomer Absorption Model: When are Newcomers Integrated into Their Teams?
Benjamin Jones, Leslie DeChurch
This study explores newcomer absorption in teams from the perspective of the incumbents, and how they adapt to the newcomer’s addition to the team. Findings support the idea that incumbent identity strength and the identity threat posed by the newcomer jointly undermine newcomer absorption.
Symposium: Across Space and Over Time: Pushing the Boundaries of Virtual Teams Research
Raquel Asencio, Yun Huang, Leslie DeChurch, Noshir Contractor, Brian Uzzi
Globalization and advancements in communication technology have encouraged the use of virtual teams; however, our knowledge of the dynamics and the implications of working across geographic, organizational, and time boundaries remains limited. Our symposium pushes the boundaries of research on virtual teams by exploring new topics and utilizing different methods.
The Ties that Form Teams: Self-Organization, Homophily, and Multiplexity
Marlon Twyman, Leslie DeChurch, Dan Newman, Noshir Contractor
This paper explains the unfolding process of team assembly – the behaviors involved as individuals consider and form relationships with potential teammates. We explore the role of self-organizing principles, homophily, and multiplexity in explaining how individuals choose their collaborators. Findings reveal multiplexity is a stronger predictor of team assembly than homophily.
Symposium: The Paradox of Multiteam Work: Factors that Pull Systems Apart and Push Teams Together
Dorothy Carter, Leslie DeChurch
Multiteam systems present a paradox of building strong component teams that function effectively as a larger system. This symposium examines factors pulling these systems apart and pushing component teams together. The papers take important next steps in advancing MTS research to new levels of theoretical precision and into new contexts.
Panel: Team Chemistry in Outer Space: Getting Along With Your Crew When You Know You Can’t Quit
Noshir Contractor
One of the riskiest group projects in history is being planned – a manned trip to Mars. This panel focuses on the composition of teams selected for long-duration space missions. It will consider what groups research across multiple disciplines can tell us about high performing teams in space missions
Team Design and Scientific Innovation: A Quasi-Experiment
Alexander C LoPilato, Raquel Asencio, Leslie DeChurch, Ruth Kanfer, Steve Zaccaro
There are two important realities of innovation, and together, they present a formidable paradox: innovation happens in teams, and various flavors of diversity have been shown to hinder team functioning. We manipulate team design to compare integration and innovation in two structures: a cross-functional team and an interdisciplinary multiteam system.
The Semantic Networks that Underpin Group Interaction
Aaron Schecter, Yiheng Sun, Leslie DeChurch, Noshir Contractor
Semantic network analysis combined with content and sentiment analysis affords new insights into the nature of group interaction. We illustrate the value of semantic network analysis as a small group research tool. For example, we find group members match one another’s social, analytic, and informational communication, but not the emotionality.
When Team Cognition Matters Most: A Meta-Analysis
Gabriel Plummer, Lindsay Larson, Jessica Mesmer-Magnus, Ashley Niler, Leslie DeChurch, Noshir Contractor
We uncover the operating conditions under which cognition is most critical to team success. Five key factors affect the instrumentality of team cognition to team affect, behavioral process, performance, and viability. These factors can be categorized as: team identity reinforcers, team stressors, team motivators, team sociomateriality, and team external embeddedness.
Northwestern Hosted a One-Day Workshop for all Faculty and Students who Participated in the 3-University Graduate Seminar
Northwestern University hosted a one-day workshop for all faculty and students who participated in the 3-university graduate seminar that was co-taught with University of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin during the winter and spring quarter. This workshop took place on June 22, 2016.
SONIC is Proud to Co-organize the 2nd International Conference on Computational Social Science at Northwestern University
SONIC is proud to co-organize the 2nd International conference on Computational Social Science by the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
IC2S2 event attendees are granted the option to select to participate in one of our Pre-Sessions, participating in either the Datathon on June 22-23, or the Skills Workshops on June 24.
IC2S2 2016 is the combination of two inaugural computational science conferences, the Computational Social Science Summit (last held May 15-17, 2015 in Evanston, Ill.) and the International Conference on Computational Social Science (last held June 8-11, 2015 in Helsinki, Finland).
Find additional information about the event by clicking here.
Congratulations to Anne Xie, for winning second place prize at the Undergrad Research Expo’s Social Sciences & Humanities
Congratulations to Anne Xie, for winning second place prize at the Undergrad Research Expo’s Social Sciences & Humanities poster session!
Under the help of Yun Huang‘s feedback, she was granted second place for her “Development of Social Relationships in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games” poster expo.
Once again, congratulations Anne! The SONIC lab members are very proud of you!
“Toward a better scientific collaboration success prediction model through the feature space expansion” published in the International Journal, Scientometrics
“Toward a better scientific collaboration success prediction model through the feature space expansion” by Fahimeh Ghasemian, Kamran Zamanifar, Nasser Ghasem-Aqaee, and Noshir Contractor were published in Scientometrics. The article highlights the problem with the prediction of scientific collaboration success based on the previous collaboration of scholars using machine learning techniques is addressed in this study. As the exploitation of collaboration network is essential in collaborator discovery systems, in this article an attempt is made to understand how to exploit the information embedded in collaboration networks. We benefit the link structure among the scholars and also among the scholars and the concepts to extract set of features that are correlated with the collaboration success and increase the prediction performance. The effect of considering other aggregate methods in addition to average and maximum, for computing the collaboration features based on the feature of the members is examined as well. A dataset extracted from Northwestern University’s SciVal Expert is used for evaluating the proposed approach. The results demonstrate the capability of the proposed collaboration features in order to increase the prediction performance in combination with the widely-used features like h-index and average citation counts. Consequently, the introduced features are appropriate to incorporate in collaborator discovery systems.
You can read the publication here.
Full citation:
Ghasemian, F., Zamanifar, K., Ghasem-Aqaee, N., & Contractor, N. (2016). Toward a better scientific collaboration success prediction model through the feature space expansion. Scientometrics, (1-25). doi: 10.1007/s11192-016-1999-x
Noshir and Colleagues Receive Outstanding Contribution Award for their paper “A Network Approach for Understanding and Analyzing Product Co-consideration Relations in Engineering Design”
Noshir Contractor and colleagues; Wei Chen, Mingxian Wang, Yun Huang and Yan Fu received an Outstanding Contribution Award for being one of ten papers that were rated in the top 5% based on reviewers’ scores. Professor Wei Chen presented the findings of the paper in a Keynote presentation at the 14th International Design Conference.
For more information on the grant that funded this project check out the following grant page.
Reference:
Wang, M., Huang, Y., Contractor, N., Fu. Y., and Chen, W., “A Network Approach for Understanding and Analyzing Product Co-consideration Relations in engineering Design”, 14th International Design Conference, May 16-19 2016, Cavtat, Dubrovnick, Croatia.
