Advancing The Science of Networks in Communities
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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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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SONIC lab is proud to welcome Peter Groenewegen, who will present a talk titled “Time as a Critical Factor in Emergency Communication” on Thursday, Oct 12, 2012 in Francis Searle Building Room 2.378 on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend.
SONIC co-organized the NetScience and Web Science conference in 2012.
See NetSci2012.net and WebSci12.org for more info.
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Northwestern Prof. Larry Birnbaum, who will present a talk titled “From Contextual Search to Automatic Content Generation: Scaling Human Editorial Judgment” on Monday May 21st from 11:00am-12:00pm in Frances Searle Building, Room 1.421 on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend.
About the talk
Systems that present people with information inescapably make editorial judgments in determining what information to show and how to show it. However the editorial values used to make these judgments are generally invisible to users and in many cases even to the engineers who design them. Our work is aimed at developing news and media information technologies that provide explicit and visible editorial control, at scale. Some of our most exciting work in this area is aimed at automatically generating stories from data. A system based on this technology is already generating more than 10 thousand stories weekly in areas ranging from sports, to business, to politics. This system is the nation’s most prolific and published author of, among other things, women’s collegiate softball stories. The stories compare favorably to those written by human beings.
About Larry Birnbaum
Larry Birnbaum received his PhD in computer science from Yale University in 1986, and joined the Northwestern faculty in 1989. His research in artificial intelligence and computer science has encompassed natural language processing, case-based reasoning, machine learning, human-computer interaction, educational software, and computer vision. Birnbaum has authored or coauthored more than eighty articles. He was the program co-chair of the 1991 International Machine Learning Workshop and has been a member of the program committee for numerous other conferences and workshops.
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SONIC Lab members Lindsay Young, Brooke Foucault and Noshir Contractor will attend the 4th International Workshop on Network Theory jointly organized by the Annenberg Network of Networks (ANN) and SONIC Workshop on April 26-28 at the University of Southern California. The theme this year is on “Social Movements and Network Theory.”
Information and many excellent presentation videos from last year’s Network Theory Conference are available here:
http://sonic.northwestern.edu/news/events/webnetsciworkshop/
Check them out to discover what exciting science is motivating these three.
Contractor to deliver plenary address at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) International Conference on Data Mining in Anaheim on April 26, 2012. SIAM is a world renowned society whose mission is to build cooperation between mathematics and the worlds of science and technology through their publications, research, and community.
For more information go to: http://www.siam.org/meetings/
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Duke University PhD candidate Catherine Shea. She will present her findings in a talk titled “Motivation as an Antecedent to Social Network Structure”. The talk will be on May 7th from 11:00am-12:30pm in Frances Searle Building, Room 1.421 on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend.
Catherine is interested in experimental methods in social network research and has presented her research at various conferences and universities around the world. She received her Master of Science from Queen’s University, Canada and was a visiting scholar in the University of British Columbia in 2011.
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Claudia Wagner will present as a part of the SONIC Speaker Series on Monday, April 2nd. The talk is titled “Extracting Semantics from User Generated Data” and will be from 2:00pm-3:00pm in Room 1441 of the Frances Searle Building on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. Claudia is currently a research assistant and PhD student at Graz University in Austria.
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