Advancing The Science of Networks in Communities
On December 1st, 2016, Noshir Contractor presented on Leveraging Computational Social Science to Address Grand Societal Challenges. The symposium, titled “Understanding social systems via computational approaches and new kinds of data”, took place from November 30 – December 1, 2016 at KOMED im MediaPark, Cologne, Germany
The complete schedule of presentations and Noshir’s talk abstract can be viewed following the link below:
As the electoral map turned crimson this evening, everyone exclaimed that the data and polls had not seen this coming. They were only partly right. At least one overlooked data source had made a very strong suggestion that Donald Trump enjoyed an unquantified current of popular support.
Please join us in celebrating the 10th birthday of Web Science at Northwestern University – the final stop of a 10-hour web-a-thon that will have spanned the globe from Singapore, Bangalore, Berlin, and London before landing in Evanston.
Nearly 20 percent of all election-related tweets come from an army of influential robots.
Read the full article here.
Congratulations to Alina, who received the Northwestern University School of Communication 2016 Graduate Dissertation award, granted annually by the department.
The title of her dissertation is “Assembly Mechanisms of Interdisciplinary Scientific Teams and Their Impact on Performance”.
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Ingmar Weber who will present a talk on Wednesday, November 16th, 2016 at 10:00 AM in Frances Searle Building, Room 1-459. Please contact SONIC Lab Manager Katya Bitkin with any questions or comments.
Abstract
How do demographic attributes affect network structure and content spread? In this talk, I’ll present attempts to address this question using a demographically annotated data set for 350K Twitter users in New York. For each user, their gender, age and race has been inferred from their profile picture using Face++. I’ll start by showing that population-level differences in hashtag usage are intuitive, such as African Americans being more likely to use #blacklivesmatter, women more likely to use #makeup, and young people more likely to use #growingupwithsiblings. Taking ideas previously studied in the context of web search, we then look at which demographic groups are generally first – or last – to use new hashtags. Here we find that, e.g., new music-related hashtags tend to originate from African American users, whereas new baseball hashtags come from white men. Looking at the topic of “algorithmic bias”, we show that the “what’s trending” tends to favor the majority group, potentially creating hurdles for minority content to benefit from system-induced feedback. Finally, I’ll show results related to racial link asymmetries, potentially indicating latent discrimination.
The work presented is joint work with Jisun An at QCRI, and several members of the Social Dynamics Lab (http://sdl.soc.cornell.edu/) at Cornell University, including Michael Macy, George Berry, Minsu Park and Chris Cameron. The research varies in terms of doneness from “medium well” to “rare”. More information on past projects at http://ingmarweber.de/publications/.
Ingmar Weber is a senior scientist in the Social Computing Group at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) in Doha. He uses large amounts of online data to address research questions of societal relevance related to (i) lifestyle diseases, (ii) societal fragmentation, and (iii) international migration. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles (http://ingmarweber.de/publications/) and his work is frequently featured in the popular press (https://www.google.com/search?tbm=nws&q=%22ingmar+weber%22). Since April 2016 he’s been selected as an ACM Distinguished Speaker.
Complex networks form the backbone of modern society: the Internet, the aviation network, the pattern of connections between individuals. And more complex examples are constantly emerging—the way genes interact in cells, how information flows through the banking system and the ecosystem.
The more complex the system, the harder it is to control. 
Nevertheless, computer scientists, doctors, economists and the like exercise a modicum of control over many of these networks.
And that raises an interesting question: is it possible to exercise the same kind of control over the most complex network we know of: the human brain?
SONIC is currently hosting the ATLAS team within its lab space.
ATLAS (Advancing Teams, Leaders, and Systems) is the group formerly known as DELTA (Developing Effective Leaders, Teams, and Alliances) – expats from Georgia Tech, headed by their director Leslie DeChurch, who transferred to the Northwestern University this fall. Four students followed Leslie DeChurch: Lindsay Larson, Ashley Niler, Gabe Plummer, and Ilya Gokhman.
ATLAS are waiting for their lab space to be built out and equipped in time for the Winter Quarter. In the meantime, we are all enjoying the very close collaboration on our joint projects.
Despite what some politicians say, no country is an island in today’s rapidly changing world. In the same way, no company can survive as an island, either.
Most won’t have noticed a recent $6.5 million Series A for a company calledMobilize, but it’s indicative of a major change occurring in businesses today. Companies’ growing reliance on a distributed workforce have been occupying headlines and podcasts for the past couple of years. However, these conversations must now turn to how companies increasingly depend on partnerships as their force multiplier.