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

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Mean-field approach for large social networks

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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).

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