SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Emmanuel Lazega, who will present a talk on Tuesday, April 29, 2014 (9:00am) in SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building room 1.459. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with a SONIC speaker please schedule a time at bit.ly/SonicSpeaker (april 28, from 10 am to 4 pm).
A Spinning Top Model of the Dynamics of Advice Networks
We argue that a spinning top model is a useful heuristic for intra-organizational learning in advice networks. This model proposes that a stabilized ‘elite’ shapes and preserves accumulated knowledge in an organization that overall experiences high turnover and systematic job rotation. We test the model by analysing the structure and dynamics of advice networks among 240 judges in a Commerical Court. Applying the model helps identify an endogenous process of increasing then decreasing centralization of the network over time. It raises questions about the maintenance and stability of its pecking order and about relationship between organizational learning in such an institution and joint regulation of markers.
About Emmanuel Lazega
Emmanuel Lazega is a professor of sociology at Sciences Po, Paris. He is a member of the editorial board of Social Networks. One of the focuses of his research is on collective learning in intra- and inter-organizational networks. In this area, he has published Micropolitics of Knowledge, New York, Aldine-de Gruyter (1992) and The Collegial Phenomenon, Oxford University Press (2001), as well as specialized papers theorizing collective learning based on empirical analyses, conducted with colleagues and doctoral students, of advice networks in various professional social settings. His publications can be found here: elazega.fr
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, who will present a talk on Thursday, April 17th, 2014 (9:00am) in SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building, room 1.459. All are welcome to attend. Please email Nancy McLaughlin to schedule a one-on-one meeting with Professor Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld (April 17, from 10.30 am to 4 pm).
Stakeholder Alignment in Complex Systems: Lessons from Alignment and Misalignment in Geoscience, Biomedicine, and Air Transportation
The capacity for science to make progress on core societal challenges requires new forms of institutional agility, yet the track record for public-private partnerships, strategic alliances, consortia, and related multi-stakeholder initiatives is mixed. This talk presents data from several collaborative efforts targeting major societal challenges: the Biomarkers Consortium at FNIH advancing personalized medicine; EarthCube, led by the NSF creating a cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences; and Aircraft Noise and Emissions, contributing to the Next Generation Air Transportation System on environmental matters. Among key findings presented are new insights into the ways that internal alignment within each institutional stakeholder is a necessary precursor to producing the collaborative structure and processes that are needed for success.
About Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld
Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld is a professor and former dean in the School of Labor and Employment Relations (LER) at the University of Illinois, where he also holds a joint appointment in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He is an award-winning author who has co-authored or co-edited ten books and over ninety articles on high performance work systems, transformation in labor-management relations, negotiations and conflict resolution, economic development, and engineering systems. His current research is centered on stakeholder alignment in complex systems – a foundation for institutions in the 21st Century. Joel was the 2009 President of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA). Prior to coming to the University of Illinois, Joel had a joint appointment in MIT’s Engineering Systems Learning Center and MIT’s Sloan School of Management, as well as appointments at Babson College and Michigan State University. He has extensive experience leading large-scale systems change initiatives with public and private stakeholders in Australia, Bermuda, Canada, Denmark, England, Iceland, Italy, Jamaica, Mexico, New Zealand, Panama, Poland, Spain, South Africa, and the United States. Joel holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Relations from MIT and a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University.
SONIC lab is proud to welcome Tina Eliassi-Rad, who will present a talk on Wednesday, May 8th, 2013 (12:00-01:00pm) in Chambers Hall, Lower Level, Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend. This seminar is organized jointly with the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems as part of the Wednesdays@NICO
Measuring Tie Strength in Implicit Social Networks
Given a set of people and a set of events attended by them, we address the problem of measuring connectedness or tie strength between each pair of persons. The underlying assumption is that attendance at mutual events gives an implicit social network between people. We take an axiomatic approach to this problem. Starting from a list of axioms, which a measure of tie strength must satisfy, we characterize functions that satisfy all the axioms. We then show that there is a range of tie-strength measures that satisfy this characterization.
A measure of tie strength induces a ranking on the edges of the social network (and on the set of neighbors for every person). We show that for applications where the ranking, and not the absolute value of the tie strength, is the important thing about the measure, the axioms are equivalent to a natural partial order. To settle on a particular measure, we must make a non-obvious decision about extending this partial order to a total order. This decision is best left to particular applications. We also classify existing tie-strength measures according to the axioms that they satisfy; and observe that none of the “self-referential” tie-strength measures satisfy the axioms. In our experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach; show the completeness and soundness of our axioms, and present Kendall Tau Rank Correlation between various tie-strength measures. Time-permitting, I will discuss the big data issues of measuring tie-strength and applications of our work in the wild (e.g., the WaPo Social Reader).
Tina Eliassi-Rad is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University. Before joining academia, she was a Member of Technical Staff and Principal Investigator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Tina earned her Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (with a minor in Mathematical Statistics) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Within data mining and machine learning, Tina’s research has been applied to the World-Wide Web, text corpora, large-scale scientific simulation data, complex networks, and cyber situational awareness. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers (including a best paper runner-up award at ICDM’09 and a best interdisciplanary paper award at CIKM’12); and has given over 70 invited presentations. Tina is an action editor for the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal. In 2010, she received an Outstanding Mentor Award from the US DOE Office of Science and a Directorate Gold Award from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for work on cyber situational awareness. Visit http://www.eliassi.org for more details.
SONIC lab is proud to welcome Nicholas Berente, who will present a talk on Thursday, April 25, 2013 (05:00-06:15pm) in the Frances Searle Building, room 1.483, Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend. If you wish to meet Dr. Berente for a 30 minute 1on1 meeting, send an e-mail to Willem Pieterson.
Digital Intensity and Variation in Design Routines: A Comparative Sociotechnical Sequence Analysis of Four Organizations
Organizations continue to embed increasingly richer repertoires of digital capabilities into their activities, and the impact of this digitalization on those routines is, as yet, not well‐understood. Will increased digital intensity reduce, increase, or have no effect on the variation of organizational routines? Furthermore, how is this routine variation affected by internal and external factors, such as centrality of the decision structure and volatility of the market environment? In this study, we leverage a novel sociotechnical sequence analysis technique to explore these questions in four theoretically‐sampled, design organizations (software development, semiconductor design, hydraulic valve design, and architecture). We study the context of design because of the fluidity, interactive complexity, knowledge‐intensiveness, heavy digitalization, and variation found in design activity.
Through this research, we advance a theory of “configural” routine variation – that of variation between components of routines – by examining the effects of (1) environmental variation; (2) structural variation; and (3) variation in digital intensity on routine variation. We propose that design routines are subject to greater variation between (rather than within) organizations; between (rather than within) similar environments; within more volatile environments; and within more de‐centralized organizations. Our analysis largely supports these theoretical arguments. Further, we find that increased digital intensity reduces process variation in design contexts. Overall, our analysis sheds new light on the interactions between organizational context, environment, and digitalization, and their impact on design routine variation. Our sequence‐analytic approach is founded on well‐established sequence analysis techniques widely used in the study of organizational routines, but extends these techniques with insights gained by sociotechnical scholarship for discovering the intricacies of the process context. The technique accounts for how digital artifacts and human activities become entangled in practice by detailing the activities, actors, artifacts, and affordances that comprise a sociotechnical routine. This study illustrates the valuable insights one might draw from the application of the approach in the study
of the digitalization of organizational routines.
About Nicholas Berente
Nicholas Berente is an assistant professor in Management Information Systems at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. He received his PhD from Case Western Reserve University and conducted his postdoctoral studies at the University of Michigan. Dr. Berente is the principal investigator for three projects funded by the National Science Foundation investigating the management of next generation scientific research centers(NSF OCI‐1059153, RCN‐1148996, CI‐TEAM‐1240160). He has contributed to a variety of NSF‐funded projects associated with distributed, collaborative innovation in multiple contexts (NSF OCI‐0943157; SES‐0621262; CCF‐0613606; IIS‐0208963) and has focused much
of his research on information technology‐enabled innovation at NASA. He has authored more than seventy peer‐reviewed articles, and his work has been published in top journals, including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Organization Science.
SONIC lab is proud to welcome Hank Green, who will present a talk on Thursday, April 11, 2013 (04:00-05:15pm) in the Stamler Conference Room (680 N Lakeshore Drive, 14th floor), Chicago Campus. All are welcome to attend.
About The Talk: Applying Network Science: An Evolving Perspective
While opinion leader and other peerbased interventions are firmly established in public health research contexts where we seek to impact individuals’ behaviors, developments in network analytic methods have led to changes in the way we understand peer influence and selection processes and in the way we can apply network studies for intervention development. I will present my framework for understanding networkbased interventions and describe how that framework has evolved in light of new network statistical approaches. I will illustrate this evolutionary process with examples of crosssectional and longitudinal studies that link individual behaviors and attitudes to network structure and composition. I conclude with some discussions of future directions in research and in application.
About Hank Green
Harold D. Green, Jr. (Hank) is a Senior Behavioral Scientist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, where he is the coordinator of the RAND Applied Network Analysis Research Group. Hank uses network analyses to understand the social and cultural determinants of health. In addition to his applied work, Hank is active in designing and implementing specialized software for the collection of longitudinal personal network data via the Internet. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Florida and is an Alumnus of the University of Illinois Training Grant in Quantitative Psychology, of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications Center for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and of the Science of Networks in Communities Research Group.
SONIC lab is proud to welcome Jana Diesner, who will present a talk on Thursday, Mar 07, 2013 (12:00-01:15pm) in Frances Searle Building Room 1.483 on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend.
About The Talk: From Words to Networks: Relevance of methodological choices for real-world applications
Coding texts as socio-technical networks – a process also known as relation extraction – can be used to collect network data on hard-to-access groups and organizations. This process requires people to choose appropriate methods and parameter settings. The impact of these choices on the resulting data and findings can be strong, but is hardly understood. I discuss our findings from addressing this problem:
We applied four common relation extraction methods – from fairly qualitative to fully automated (including probabilistic, machine-learning based techniques) – to large-scale, open-source corpora from the business, science and geopolitical domain, and compared the retrieved networks. I will report on common agreements and disagreements about network structure and behavior depending on the considered methods, and show how these methods can be combined to gain a more robust and comprehensive understanding of a network.
Another factor limiting the reliability of relation extraction methods is the propagation of errors throughout multi-step analysis procedures and pipelines. I will present our findings from a series of empirical experiments that we conducted to find answers to the following question: How much variation in network structure and properties is due to the error rates of the involved sub-routines? Does increasing the accuracy of these techniques actually matter for network analysis results?
About Jana Diesner
Jana Diesner is an Assistant Professor at the iSchool (a.k.a. Graduate School of Library and Information Science) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science. Jana conducts research at the nexus of network science, natural language processing and machine learning. With her work, she aims to advance the understanding and computational analysis of the interplay and co-evolution of information and socio-technical networks. She develops, analyzes and applies methods and technologies for extracting information about networks from text data and considering the substance of information for network analysis. In her empirical work, she studies networks from the business, science and geopolitical domain. She is particularly interested in covert information and covert networks. For more information see http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~jdiesner/.
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)
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
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).
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 Lab is proud to welcome Emmanuel Lazega, who will present a talk on Tuesday, April 29, 2014 (9:00am) in SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building room 1.459. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with a SONIC speaker please schedule a time at bit.ly/SonicSpeaker (april 28, from 10 am to 4 pm).
