SONIC is pleased to welcome Alina Lungeanu as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and affiliated with SONIC and ATLAS. Alina received a Ph.D. in Technology and Social Behavior from Northwestern University in 2016 and was a SONIC member during her graduate studies.
Jackie Ng – a finalist in the INFORMS Organization Science Dissertation Proposal Competition
SONIC member and Ph.D candidate in Industrial Engineering & Management Scienes, Jackie Ng, was selected as one of eight finalists in the INFORMS Organization Science Dissertation Proposal Competition, one of the most prestigious competitions available to doctoral students studying organizations. Finalists presented their dissertation proposals during a workshop on Saturday, October 21st to a panel of judges at the 2017 INFORMS annual conference in Houston. Jackie’s dissertation proposal is titled Social media and their affordances for effective teamwork.
SONIC welcomes back Bo Xu, visiting scholar, for a 2-week visit
SONIC is pleased to welcome back Bo Xu, Department of Information Systems, School of Business Administration, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China, for a 2-week visit (Nov 14th to Nov 28th, 2017).
Noshir Contractor presents at the ETCPS in Iowa City
On November 15th, 2017, Noshir presented at the Educational Technology and Computational Psychometrics Symposium organized by ACTNext: the Research, Development and Business Innovation Center at ACT, Iowa City.
Noshir’s talk was titled Some Assembly Required: Collaboration in the 21st Century.
Noshir Contractor presented at the Case Western Interdepartmental Research Seminar
On October 27th, 2017, Noshir gave a talk at the Case Western Weatherhead School of Management’s Interdepartmental Research Seminar (jointly sponsored by Design & Innovation and Organizational Behavior).
He presented on Leveraging Computational Social Science to Address Grand Societal Challenges.
Noshir Contractor co-chaired a National Academies of Science event
On October 11th, 2017, Noshir co-chaired a National Academies of Science Workshop in Washington, D.C. on Leveraging Advances in Social Network Thinking for National Security.
Noshir Contractor at ATLC2017: Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy
On October 10th, Noshir gave a welcome and plenary talk at the ATLC2017: Atlanta conference on science and innovation policy.
Noshir Contractor gave two talks as an invited speaker at CCS 2017 in Cancun, Mexico
This September, Noshir Contractor was invited to present at the Conference on Complex Systems 2017 in Cancun, Mexico.
On September 19th, Noshir presented on Leveraging Computational Social Science to address Grand Societal Challenges ( abstract ) in a session titled “Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) – Social Systems and Human Interactions.”
On September 20th, Noshir presented on Can CSS motivate New Theories, Data Sources Methods? ( abstract ) in a session titled “Computational Social Science and Complexity: From Socio-Physics to Data-Driven Research. In memoriam Rosaria Conte.”
The Social Bow Tie
A recent study investigated a new way to identify the strength of ties. Using two different large datasets, the researchers found that for each pair of individuals, a bow tie structure of the network itself is strongly associated with the strength of ties between them that the researchers measure in other ways.
The abstract of the paper is as follows: Understanding tie strength in social networks, and the factors that influence it, have received much attention in a myriad of disciplines for decades. Several models incorporating indicators of tie strength have been proposed and used to quantify relationships in social networks, and a standard set of structural network metrics have been applied to predominantly online social media sites to predict tie strength. Here, we introduce the concept of the “social bow tie” framework, a small subgraph of the network that consists of a collection of nodes and ties that surround a tie of interest, forming a topological structure that resembles a bow tie. We also define several intuitive and interpretable metrics that quantify properties of the bow tie. We use random forests and regression models to predict categorical and continuous measures of tie strength from different properties of the bow tie, including nodal attributes. We also investigate what aspects of the bow tie are most predictive of tie strength in two distinct social networks: a collection of 75 rural villages in India and a nationwide call network of European mobile phone users. Our results indicate several of the bow tie metrics are highly predictive of tie strength, and we find the more the social circles of two individuals overlap, the stronger their tie, consistent with previous findings. However, we also find that the more tightly-knit their non-overlapping social circles, the weaker the tie. This new finding complements our current understanding of what drives the strength of ties in social networks.
A link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04177
A link to a news article for the paper: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609146/how-close-are-you-really/
The Strength of Absent Ties: Social Integration via Online Dating
by Josué Ortega and Philipp Hergovich
We used to marry people to which we were somehow connected to: friends of friends, schoolmates, neighbors. Since we were more connected to people similar to us, we were likely to marry someone from our own race.
However, online dating has changed this pattern: people who meet online tend to be complete strangers. Given that one-third of modern marriages start online, the authors investigate theoretically, using random graphs and matching theory, the effects of those previously absent ties in the diversity of modern societies.
The authors find that when a society benefits from previously absent ties, social integration occurs rapidly, even if the number of partners met online is small. Their findings are consistent with the sharp increase in interracial marriages in the U.S. in the last two decades.
Read the full article here.