Today, SONIC Director Noshir Contractor will be participating in an event organized by Northwestern’s School of Communication and Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law. The conference is taking place today (2/1), in Los Angeles California and is sponsored by law firm Loeb & Loeb, LLP. The event features various speakers to explain how generative AI is changing the conversation in entertainment, technology, and law. Prof. Contractor will be presenting with Prof. Duri Long (assistant professor of Communication Studies) during Panel 2, which is focused on generative AI and creative output. This portion of the conference will aim to answer the following questions– how do creators interact with AI? Who owns creative products co-created with AI? To read more about the event, click here.

Director of McCormick Engineering Global Initiatives Matthew Grayson hosted the Four Corners Virtual Workshop on Sustainability– a series of small-group research brainstorming sessions between four international universities (Northwestern, Tel Aviv University (TAU), National Taiwan University (NTU), and the University of Hamburg (UH)). With so much academic talent in one place, Grayson relied on SONIC Director Noshir Contractor’s new match-making algorithm to formulate groups of between 3-6 attendees, generating 47 research collaborations on dozens of topics between combinations of researchers across all participating universities. SONIC Alum Diego Gomez-Zara worked together with Grayson and the Global Initiatives Staff to compile a survey that matched researchers and automated the team-building process. Congrats Diego! The workshop noted a highly successful example of SONIC research initiatives in action. For more information on the process and workshop, read more.

Today (December 4th, 2023), SONIC Director Noshir Contractor will lead a talk in Dubai as part of COP28’s THINK EXPONENTIAL Workshop. Prof Contractor’s “Think Networks” talk will be centered around the question: “are you using the power of social?” Discussions will focus on how to make social networks work for us. The leadership workshop, spread over two days, is sponsored by IBM.

SONIC director Noshir Contractor was invited to the Northwestern University Transportation Center’s Fall 2023 Business Advisory Council meeting on November 9th. Professor Contractor was invited to speak about his research surrounding Teams in the Digital Workplace: Technology’s Role for Communication, Collaboration, and Performance. Read more about the research’s insights here.

Earlier this week, SONIC Director Noshir Contractor and Graduate Student Researcher Neelam Modi attended and participated in the Council of Engineering Systems Universities 2023 Symposium. The Council provides a mechanism for member universities to work together on developing engineering systems as a new field of study. An overall objective of the Council is to broaden engineering education and practice. Neelam gave a talk on Social Influence & Customer Preferences: A Case Study in the U.S. New Car Buyer Market, and Noshir served on a panel discussing Network Methods for Multi-Agent Sociotechnical Systems. Congrats, Noshir and Neelam!

Yesterday, SONIC Director Noshir Contractor gave a keynote speech at the 7th ICCOMAC 2023. Professor Contractor traveled to Bali for the International Conference on Corporate and Marketing Communication and was joined by many other speakers sharing their expertise. Congratulations!

SONIC Director Noshir Contractor will be one of four keynote speakers at the 4th COMNEWS 2023, the International Conference on Communication and New Media Studies. This year’s conference topic is “Rethinking post-digital society: Imagining the future of media, communication, and sustainability”. Noshir Contractor’s keynote will focus on leveraging computational social science to address societal challenges, illustrating how increased access to big data offers social scientists and social network scholars an unprecedented opportunity to engage more actively in monitoring, anticipating, and designing interventions to address grand societal challenges. The conference is supported by the ICA Indonesia Chapter and will take place October 25th and 26th in Sanur, Bali.

COMNEWS 2023 E-POSTER

SONIC Director Noshir Contractor has collaborated with Jacqueline Lane (Harvard Business School), Paul Leonardi (UC Santa Barbara), and Leslie DeChurch (Northwestern University) on a new article surrounding technology’s role for communication, collaboration, and performance. The research examines the use of digital collaboration technologies by organizational teams and their effect on team communication and collaboration. By analyzing the ways in which digital communication technologies revolutionize how teams work, the paper explores the potential relationships between technology affordances and essential team processes. Read the article here.

This past summer, SONIC Director Noshir Contractor was an organizer of the 10th International Workshop on Network Theory. The organization of the conference is a joint effort between Annenberg Networks Network, Northwestern University’s SONIC Lab, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). The theme for this past year’s workshop was “Human AI Social Networks @ Work” and focused on topical areas such as human agent/robot teaming, virtual organization, crowd sourcing, social media, networks, and more. To see the full weekend’s schedule and read more about featured speakers, check out the ANN-SONIC-NICO webpage. Also, be sure to watch the weekend’s workshops on our SONIC YouTube page.