Are we really going to Mars? The astronautical community certainly believes the answer is “yes.” Scientists all over the world are solving puzzles related to rocket reusability, human resistance to radiation exposure, and terraforming Mars to warm it up and give it a breathable atmosphere. The scientific challenges of a Mars mission are not confined to physical science and engineering. Once the rockets are built and tested, we will ultimately be sending human teams off to explore the galaxy. A central mission parameter for deep space exploration is teamwork. Communication Studies Professors Leslie DeChurch and Noshir Contractor are working with NASA to assemble and support inter-planetary dream teams. In this session, we will share the current plans for space travel and colonization, provide a behind the scenes look at how we are designing teams, and help you design dream teams back on Earth.

SONIC members present various projects throughout SIOP 2018:

Noshir Contractor presented on “Leveraging Computational Social Science to Address Grand Societal Challenges” on April 16, 2018.

The increased access to big data about social phenomena in general, and network data in particular, has been a windfall for social scientists. But these exciting opportunities must be accompanied with careful reflection on how big data can motivate new theories and methods. Using examples of his research in areas of disaster response, global health, scientific collaboration, and the mission to Mars, Contractor will argue that computational social science serves as the foundation to unleash the intellectual insights locked in big data. More importantly, he will illustrate how these insights offer social scientists in general, and social network scholars in particular, an unprecedented opportunity to engage more actively in monitoring, anticipating, and designing interventions to address grand societal challenges.

The Ph.D. student, Diego Gómez-Zará, and the CITEP’s Director of Projects, Silvia Andreoli, presented the findings and results of the My Dream Team case study elaborated at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Both scholars were interviewed in the program “Académicamente” transmitted by the radio of the university. The objective of this program is to generate a space for sharing and diffusing research projects of the university. The interview was on April 10th.

On April 9th, Professor Noshir Contractor and his Ph.D. student Diego Gómez-Zará presented the results of the team assembly case study conducted at the Center for Technological and Pedagogical Innovation (CITEP – Centro de Innovación en Tecnología y Pedagogía). The talk was given at the University of Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Noshir and Diego presented how the participants of this academic program searched and invited others to assemble teams. The main results explain the relevant features for creating effective teams and demonstrate how My Dream Team –a web-based teaming search platform– facilitate the formation of teams in educational contexts.

Diego Gómez-Zará is going to attend the 13th Annual INGRoup Conference on July 18-22, in Washington, DC. He will present one of the My Dream Team project’s publications called “Social Cognition and Team Assembly: Competence, Warmth, or Embeddedness,” co-authored with Jacqueline Ng, Marlon Twyman, Silvia Andreoli, Leslie DeChurch, and Noshir Contractor.

Sid Jha will give a lightning talk “A Computational Platform to Evaluate the Ability to Perceive Social Connections” at the 2018 Computational Research Day on April 10, 2018. Moreover, Sid and Matt (both Undergraduate Research Assistants at SONIC) will present their posters then, respectively:

• Creating a Framework for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Various Search Strategies in the Small-World Phenomenon (by Matt)
• Network Acuity: Social Perceptions in a Small-World Experiment (by Sid)

Both abstracts and posters are available: http://computational-research-day.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/posters/

Jeremy Foote attended iConference on March 27, 2018 in Sheffield, UK where he presented work on characterizing founders of online peer production communities, coauthored with Noshir Contractor.

Foote, J., Contractor, N. The Behavior and Network Position of Peer Production Founders.

SONIC lab member Jackie Ng has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship with the Laboratory for Innovation Science (LISH) at Harvard University starting in Fall 2018. Congratulations!

Jacqueline Ng, Ph.D. candidate, and Diego Gómez-Zará, Ph.D. student, presented their current research at the ATLAS’s Teams Research Incubator for doctoral students and junior faculty, in Evanston, IL

On March 17th, Jacqueline presented “Information sharing in online teams: How information processing interventions affect team discussions” in a session titled “Multilevel Perspectives on Teams.”

Then, on March 18th, Diego presented his work on team recommender systems: “Social Cognition and Team Assembly:
Competence, Warmth, or Embeddedness.” The session was titled “Perceptions & Teams.”