Advancing The Science of Networks in Communities
On October 18, 2017, Noshir presented at the Sciences Po conference organized by the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations in Paris, France.
The title of his talk was Some assembly required: Leveraging computational social science to understand and enable team assembly.
The SONIC Speaker Series presents
College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Michael D. Siciliano of the Univeristy of Illinois at Chicago. Prof. Siciliano speak on Monday, November 13, 2017 at 10:00 AM in Frances Searle Building, Room 1-489. Please contact Dr. Michael Schultz with any questions.
Abstract:
How do institutional changes affect micro-level behaviors? International agreements such as the Nagoya and Cartagena Protocols of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are resulting in new policy institutions that regulate the global exchange and use of biological materials in research. These rules are shifting the locus of control over materials from individual researchers to institutions that represent stakeholder interests. Traditionally, material resource exchange occurs within social networks that link scientists with other scientists and with provider organizations. In this new context of contested resources, access to and exchange of biological materials are jointly determined by personal networks and the new authority structures that govern the exchange relationships within the networks. Relying on a nationally representative sample of scientists in the United States, this talk explores how institutional controls on resource inputs affect collaboration structures and science production.
Stream the talk here:
The SONIC Speaker Series presents
D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Christoph Riedl of the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University. Prof. Riedl will present a talk on Monday, October 23, 2017 at 10:00 AM in Frances Searle Building, Room 1-489. Please contact Michael Schultz with any questions.
Abstract:
In most areas of human performance, the path to major accomplishments requires a steep learning curve, long practice and many trials. Athletes go through years of training and compete repeatedly before setting new records; musicians practice from an early age and perform in secondary venues before earning the spotlight. Yet, little is known about the quantitative patterns that lead to success in creative fields. In this talk we provide a quantitative framework to describe the evolution of success in artistic careers, and ask: Is the success of a particular artist predictable? Are there network measures that improve our understanding of success? We focus on trajectories followed by visual artists through a network of galleries and museums, and show that the prestige of institutions, quantified through network measures, fully determines an artist’s future success. Starting in prestigious venues increases the chance of exhibiting in more venues, appealing to a more international audience, and of being successful in the auction market.
Christoph Riedl is the Joseph G. Riesman Research assistant professor for Information Systems at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University. He hold a joint appointment with the College of Computer & Information Science and is a core faculty at the Network Science Institute. He is a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. He is recipient of a Young Investigator Award (YIP) from Army Research Office (ARO) for his work on social networks in collaborative decision-making. Before joining Northeastern University he was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Business School and IQSS. He received a PhD in Information Systems from Technische Universität München (TUM), Germany in 2011, a MSc in Information Systems in 2007, and a BSc in Computer Science in 2006. His work has been funded by NSF and published in leading journals including Management Science, Information Systems Research, and Academy of Management Discoveries.
It has recently become possible to study the dynamics of information diffusion in techno-social systems at scale, due to the emergence of online platforms, such as Twitter, with millions of users. One question that systematically recurs is whether information spreads according to simple or complex dynamics: does each exposure to a piece of information have an independent probability of a user adopting it (simple contagion), or does this probability depend instead on the number of sources of exposure, increasing above some threshold (complex contagion)? Most studies to date are observational and, therefore, unable to disentangle the effects of confounding factors such as social reinforcement, homophily, limited attention, or network community structure. Here we describe a novel controlled experiment that we performed on Twitter using ‘social bots’ deployed to carry out coordinated attempts at spreading information. We propose two Bayesian statistical models describing simple and complex contagion dynamics, and test the competing hypotheses. We provide experimental evidence that the complex contagion model describes the observed information diffusion behavior more accurately than simple contagion. Future applications of our results include more effective defenses against malicious propaganda campaigns on social media, improved marketing and advertisement strategies, and design of effective network intervention techniques.
On October 13-15, SONIC Ph.D. students Kyosuke Tanaka, Zachary Gibson, Diego Gomez-Zara, and the Ph.D. candidates Marlon Twyman and Jaqueline Ng will present at the Organizational Communication Mini Conference, held in Athens, Ohio.
SONIC graduate student, Diego Gomez-Zara, will present one poster at the Computational + Journalism Symposium (C+J) 2017 held at Northwestern University on October 13th, 2017. We present a system that identifies the main entities of the article, and it uses dictionaries based on fictional characters and sentiment analysis to determine when an entity is being cast as a hero, villain, or a victim. This system interacts with news consumers directly through a browser extension. Our hope is that by informing readers when an entity is cast in one of these roles, we can make implicit bias explicit, and assist readers in applying their media literacy skills.
by Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula, and Ethan Zuckerman
Over the last 13 years, Facebook has evolved from a lifestyle site for college kids into a cornerstone of civic life. It is one of a handful of very large platforms that dominate our online world. As such platforms have gained traction, the web has transformed from an open space for free expression into a corporate-owned gated community of private platforms.
The power of giant platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter leads to problems ranging from the threat of government-ordered censorship to more subtle, algorithmic biases in the curation of content users consume. Moreover, as these platforms expand their reach, the ripple effects of exclusion can have serious consequences for people’s personal and professional lives, and users have no clear path to recourse. The platforms that host and inform our networked public sphere are unelected, unaccountable, and often impossible to audit or oversee.
In response, there is a growing movement among free speech advocates to create new technology to address these concerns. Early web pioneers like Brewster Kahle have called for ways we might “lock the web open” with code, enabling peer-to-peer interactions in place of mediated private platforms. The idea is to return to the good old days of the early ’90’s web, when users published content directly in a user-friendly decentralized fashion, without the need for corporate intermediaries and their aspirational approach.
Read the full article here.
Sue Ashford, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, breaks down her decades of research on leadership—who achieves it, and how a group grants it. She explains that the world isn’t divided into leaders and followers. Instead, it’s a state that everyone can reach, whether they’re officially in charge or not. She also explains why shared leadership benefits a team and organization. Ashford offers tips on how to effectively grow leadership in yourself and your employees.
On August 5-8 SONIC and ATLAS members with Noshir Contractor and Leslie DeChurch will present at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (AOM) in Atlanta, GA. The conference theme this year is At the Interface. You can find the complete program and schedule here. To see a distilled schedule of SONIC and ATLAS presentations and their abstracts, please follow this link.
Noshir Contractor is attending the 2017 IEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) in Sydney, Australia.
A paper, co-authored by Noshir is being presented at the conference:
Li, Y., Sun, Y., & Contractor, N. (2017, August). Graph mining assisted semi-supervised learning for fraudulent cash-out detection.