On Friday, April 28th, Noshir and Leslie presented a paper Exploring New Frontiers: Building Better Teams on Earth and Beyond in a symposium at the 2017 SIOP conference in Orlando, Florida.

Jacqueline Ng, Brennan Antone, Zachary Gibson, Suzanne T. Bell, Leslie A. DeChurch, Noshir Contractor: Crew Recommender for Effective Work in Space: CREWS

We welcome back Noshir Contractor to the Northwestern University campus after spending the 2017 Winter Quarter as the Distinguished WTO Visiting Scholar at the Center for Work, Technology, & Organizations (WTO) in the Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University’s School of Engineering. For more details, please see here.

“Teaming at the Limit: Enhancing Team Effectiveness with Enterprise Social Media Affordances”, a paper written by SONIC lab member, Jackie Ng, in collaboration with Noshir Contractor, Paul Leonardi & Leslie DeChurch, was judged to be one of the best accepted papers (top 10%) in the 2017 Academy of Management Meeting taking place in Atlanta Georgia, August 4-8. This high honor entitles the paper to be published in the Proceedings of the 2017 AoM Meeting.

Currently, Brennan is working in SONIC as an undergraduate research assistant. He is an invaluable member of the CREWS project team.

Brennan will be entering the PhD program in Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences at Northwestern University in Fall 2017, and will continue to work with SONIC in his new role. He is the recipient of a Harold Richards Graduate Fellowship for researchers in organization theory and systems analysis. Congratulations to Brennan!

The 8th ANN-SONIC International Workshop on Network Theory is being held at the University of Southern California (USC) on March 23-24, 2017.  The theme this year is “Wisdom in Networks.” 

For details on program, speakers the participants for this invitational workshop please see this link.

SONIC and ATLAS students presented three posters at the workshop:

Kyosuke Tanaka, Mo Ran, Jeremy Piech, & Noshir Contractor, Follow the Crowds? A Quasi-Experimental Study of “Social Signal” Effects on Online Design Ratings.

Jacqueline Ng, Leslie A. DeChurch, & Noshir S. Contractor, Information Sharing in Virtual Teams: How Group Information Processing Norms Affect Online Team Discussions.

Lindsay Larson, Diego Gomez-Zara, Benjamin Jones, Leslie DeChurch, & Noshir Contractor, The Language of Leadership Networks in Multiteam Systems.

The workshop is being organized by the Annenberg Networks Network (ANN) at the University of Southern California, the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research group at the Northwestern University.

This new project will carry out a decadal survey on the social and behavioral  sciences (SBS) in areas relevant to national security. The survey will identify opportunities that are poised to contribute significantly to the intelligence community’s analytic responsibilities. Please follow the link for the full statement of task.

The first meeting for the Decadal Survey of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Applications to National Security will be held March 23 – March 24, 2017 in Washington, DC.

On March 13th Noshir Contractor gave a distinguished lecture titled “Some Assembly required: Organizing in the 21st century”. The event was organized by the Center for Technological and Pedagogical Innovation (CITEP – Centro de Innovación en Tecnología y Pedagogía) of the University of Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Noshir presented research on creating effective teams and demonstrated MyDreamTeam, a web-based teaming platform used to understand and facilitate the formation of teams in educational contexts.

Congratulations to Eric Forbush, former SONIC Lab Manager and a post-baccalaureate researcher! Eric is now a graduate student at PENN, studying towards his PhD at the Annenberg School of Communication.

For the 2017 competition, NSF received over 13,000 applications, and made 2,000 award offers. We are proud of Eric for having received this prestigious award!