SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Ryan Boyd, who will present a talk on Wednesday, November 18th, 2015 at 10:00 AM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend.

To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Ryan Boyd please schedule a time here.

Title 

A Way with Words: Language and Psychological Science in the Modern Era

Abstract

In the modern era, people generate data on a scale never before witnessed in human history. In particular, the internet creates a space where people can express their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in their own words. The language that people share inherently reflects the precise phenomena that many social scientists seek to capture and understand. However, language data can often be difficult to quantify and understand in objective, empirical terms. How can we use a person’s language to better understand their social and psychological processes? This talk provides an overview of research that illustrates just how powerful words can be for understanding a person’s mental universe. Research discussed will include topics such as psychological fingerprinting, values, mental health, and often-overlooked social processes.

Biography

Ryan Boyd is a senior graduate student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Ryan is considered to be a leading expert on natural language, big data, and social psychology. Additionally, he is the developer of various language analysis applications that have been adopted for research in over 30 countries around the world. His work has been published in top psychology journals, including Psychological Science, and has been repeatedly featured at interdisciplinary research conferences.

Please contact Meghan McCarter with any questions or comments.

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Christopher Marcum, who will present a talk on Wednesday, November 4th, 2015 at 4:00 PM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend.

To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Marcum please schedule a time here.

Title

An Ego-Centric Relational Events Model of Buffet Selection Processes in an Experimental Virtual Reality Setting

Abstract

The relational events model (REM) framework for social action (Butts 2008) has recently been demonstrated to be useful as a model of a wide range of temporally unfolding events and not just limited to the dyadic case as originally designed. The framework has shown promise, for example, in modeling ego-centric studies, as well as event histories that involve multiple event types and exogenous events (Marcum & Butts 2015). Additionally, recent work has demonstrated how careful use of support constraints within the REM framework facilitates its application in experimental designs (Tranmer et al. 2015). We extend this line of research by combining these various generalized applications of the REM in a single scenario—ego-centric event histories with multiple event types and support constraints in an experimental design.

Two hundred twenty-one overweight mothers of children between 4 and 5 were randomized to one of four feedback conditions that emphasized different health information about eating and health: 1) food safety control (Control); 2) behavioral-risk information; or 3), behavioral-risk information plus personal family health history-based risk assessment. After a short survey was administered to the participants and they were given their randomly selected feedback to read, each mother put on a head-mounted display helmet and was immersed in a virtual buffet environment. In the buffet, mothers selected from a set of virtual food and drink choices for their child’s lunch. Prior work (McBride et al. 2013) has shown that the feedback conditions deferentially impacted the total number of calories on the plate at the end of the simulation. Here, however, we evaluate whether the behavioral food selection process giving rise to those choices also differs by feedback condition.

We use the REM framework to address a simple research question: 1) to what extent do the feedback conditions shape the behavioral process unfolding during the buffet simulation? We specify sufficient statistics for both environmental and behavioral constraints on the buffet selection process. These include structural statistics for the food ordering effects and differential serving sizes, and behavioral statistics for choice inertia, “saving dessert for last” and “grazing versus browsing.” Preliminary REM results show evidence of differential preferences for the rate at which certain foodstuffs are selected, that smaller portion size drives actors to make multiple selections of the same foodstuff in a row, healthful choices are likely to precede unhealthful ones, and spatial ordering effects. Differential impacts of the feedback condition on the behavioral selection process will be discussed in the context of REM model selection.

Biography

Dr. Marcum received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California-Irvine in 2011. His dissertation research focused on health and social structural explanations of age differences in daily social interactions. His current research seeks to understand how health shapes family network processes across the life course, on the one hand, and to develop statistical models for network analysis on the other. Through his methodological work in mathematical sociology he has demonstrated expertise in modeling a wide range of social systems, including: interorganizational disaster response networks, relational events processes, epidemic dynamics, and inter-generational communication.

A recording of Christopher Marcum’s Presentation can be found here, or can be viewed below!

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Polo Chau, who will present a talk on Wednesday, October 7th, 2015 at 3:00 PM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Chau please schedule a time here. Please contact Meghan McCarter with any questions or comments.

Data Mining Meets HCI: Scalable Interactive Tools for Large Graph Sensemaking

Abstract

My group at Georgia Tech innovates at the intersection of Data Mining and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to help people make sense of massive datasets. We combine the best from both worlds to create novel tools for billions-scale graphs. I will describe some of our latest works and ideas:

1) Attention Routing, based on anomaly detection, that draws people’s attention to interesting parts of the graph. Examples include the Polonium and Aesop malware detection technology, deployed and patented by Symantec, that unearth malware from 37 billion machine-file relationships, with up to 99% detection rate; the NetProbe system detects auction fraud on eBay and fingers bad guys by identifying their networks of suspicious transactions.

2) Mixed-initiative graph sensemaking, such as the Apolo system and the MAGE system that combines machine inference and visualization to guide the user to interactively explore large graphs.

3) Scalable analytics that leverages virtual memory to enable billion-node computation on a single PC, using simple code that outperforms state-of-the-art techniques.

Biography 

Duen Horng (Polo) Chau is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering, and an Associate Director of the MS Analytics program. Polo holds a PhD in Machine Learning and a Masters in human-computer interaction (HCI). His PhD thesis won Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention.

Polo’s research lab bridges data mining and HCI to solves large-scale, real world problems. They develop scalable, interactive, and interpretable tools for big data analytics.  Their patented Polonium malware detection technology protects 120 million people worldwide. Their auction fraud detection research was widely covered by media. Their fake review detection research received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2014 SIAM Data Mining Conference.

Polo received faculty awards from Google, Yahoo, and LexisNexis, Raytheon Faculty Fellowship, Edenfield Faculty Fellowship, Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. He is the only two-time Symantec fellow and an award-winning designer.

A recording of Polo Chau’s Presentation can be found here, or can be viewed below!

SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Ludo Waltman, who will present a talk on Wednesday, September 9th, 2015 at 10:00 AM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Waltman please schedule a time here. To sign up for his workshop, click here. Please contact Eric Forbush with any questions or comments.

Large-scale analysis of bibliometric networks: Tools, techniques, and applications

Abstract

The analysis of bibliometric networks has the potential to offer deep insights into the structure and dynamics of science. I will provide an overview of research into bibliometric network analysis at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University. Two popular software tools for the analysis and visualization of bibliometric networks have been created at CWTS. These tools, VOSviewer (www.vosviewer.com) and CitNetExplorer (www.citnetexplorer.nl), will be demonstrated and the underlying network analysis techniques will be discussed. A number of large-scale applications of bibliometric network analysis will be presented. One application investigates the degree to which network science is evolving to become a single unified research field. Other applications are concerned with research planning and research evaluation. In these applications, bibliometric network analysis is used to identify the key research strengths of a university, to study the interdisciplinary nature of modern science, and to detect new emerging research areas.

Biography

Ludo Waltman is a senior researcher at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University, where he leads the research program on advanced bibliometric methods. Ludo’s research interests focus on methodological topics in the field of bibliometrics and scientometrics, in particular the analysis and visualization of bibliometric networks and the development of bibliometric indicators. Together with his colleague Nees Jan van Eck, Ludo has developed two software tools for the analysis and visualization of bibliometric networks: VOSviewer and CitNetExplorer. Ludo serves as Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Informetrics, one of the leading journals in the field of bibliometrics and scientometrics. Ludo also has an extensive experience in the use of bibliometric network analysis in commissioned research projects for universities, research funders, and scientific publishers.

Workshop ‘Network visualization using VOSviewer’

Date & Time: September 9th, 2 pm

Location: SONIC Lab, room 1-459, Francis Searle, Northwestern University

VOSviewer (www.vosviewer.com) is a popular software tool for network visualization developed at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University. The main focus of the tool is on visualizing bibliometric networks, in particular co-authorship networks, citation networks, and term co-occurrence networks, but VOSviewer can also be used for visualizing all kinds of non-bibliometric networks. This workshop offers an introduction into the VOSviewer tool. Ludo Waltman, one of the developers of VOSviewer, will guide the workshop participants through an interactive tutorial that provides the participants with extensive hands-on experience with VOSviewer. At the end of the workshop, participants will be able to create their own network visualizations using VOSviewer. This includes not only visualizations of bibliometric networks constructed based on data from databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed, but also visualizations of other types of networks, including term co-occurrence networks constructed from a large text corpora using VOSviewer’s text mining features.

Workshop participants are kindly requested to bring a laptop with them.

 Flyers

Click on this link to see the flyer for Ludo Waltman’s presentation: Waltman Speaker Flyer

Click on this link to see the flyer for Ludo Waltman’s workshop: Waltman Workshop Flyer