On Thursday, October 18th, Noshir Contractor will present, “Inhaling digital exhaust data from Enterprise Social Media to understand and enable teaming,” a paper with Paul Leonardi (UC Santa Barbara), Leslie DeChurch, and SONIC alum Jackie Ng (Harvard Business School) at The Inaugural Case Workshop on Digital Innovation at Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH. The workshop will gather an interdisciplinary community to spark ideas that will draw out the implications of digital innovation for customers and markets, organizations, industries as well as the broader economy and society.

Link: https://weatherhead.case.edu/events/digital-innovation/

Noshir Contractor presented research on teams going into isolated (space) environments, titled “Social isolation: A challenge in and out of this world.”  at an invitational workshop organized by Amazon on October 17 in Seattle titled “All Boats Rise? Social Capital, Promise and Peril” in a session titled “No One is an (I) Land.”

Welcome!

Yuanxin Wang is a visiting scholar from Peking University. She will be working on the Enterprise Social Media project, and her research interests include social media, social network analysis, market and media analysis, and user behavior. She graduated from Beijing Normal University with a B.A. in Communications.

Dongping Zhang is a first-year Ph.D. student in Technology & Social Behavior. His research interests include social network analysis, structural estimation, machine learning, big data, and computational social science. He will be contributing to the Enterprise Social Media project. Dongping graduated from the University of Chicago with an M.A. in Computational Social Science and from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Statistics and a B.A. in Economics.

Niloufar Izadinia is a second year Ph.D. student in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences. Her research interests include social network analysis, optimization, and data science. Niloufar will work on the NASA CREWS (Project RED Optimization). She graduated from the University of Technology, Tehran, Iran with an M.S. in Industrial Engineering.

Brent Hoagland finished his M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and will support the SONIC and ATLAS labs with administrative and operational research tasks. He plans to continue graduate school in the near future with research interests in economic sociology, social studies of finance & accounting, social network analysis, and sociology of knowledge.

Noshir Contractor and Diego Gómez-Zará, Ph.D. student in Technology and Social Behavior, head to Buenos Aires to present, “Some Assembly Required: Organizing in the 21st Century” at the Argentinian Ministry of Modernization of the Nation.

Generative Modeling of Human Behavior and Social Interactions Using Abductive Analysis

Abstract:

Abduction is an inference approach that uses data and observations to identify plausible (and preferably, best) explanations for phenomena. Applications of abduction (e.g., robotics, genetics, image understanding) have largely been devoid of human behavior. Here, we devise and execute an iterative abductive analysis process that is driven by the social sciences: behaviors and interactions among groups of human subjects. One goal is to understand intra-group cooperation and its effect on fostering collective identity. We build an online game platform; perform and analyze controlled laboratory experiments; form hypotheses; build, exercise, and evaluate network-based agent-based models; and evaluate the hypotheses in multiple abductive iterations, improving our understanding as the process unfolds. While the experimental results are of interest, the paper’s thrust is methodological, and indeed establishes the potential of iterative abductive looping for the (computational) social sciences.

Ren, Y., Cedeno-Mieles, V., Hu, Z., Deng, X., Adiga, A., Barrett, C. L., et al. (2018). Generative Modeling of Human Behavior and Social Interactions Using Abductive Analysis (pp. 1–8). Presented at the International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining, 2009. ASONAM ’09.

Seniors’ usage of mobile social network sites: Applying theories of innovation diffusion and uses and gratifications