Aaron M. Schecter, SONIC alumnus and Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Management Science, received the 2018 J. Richard Hackman Award for his Ph.D. dissertation at INGroup 2018. The conference recognizes recent graduate students whose dissertation shows the greatest potential to advance the study of groups.

The SONIC research group and ATLAS laboratory at Northwestern University invite applications for a research lab manager to support lab directors Noshir Contractor (SONIC) and Leslie DeChurch (ATLAS) on administrative and operational aspects of their research portfolios.

The lab manager will be responsible for supporting a variety of lab operations, including reporting and compliance requirements, communication of findings through digital displays and online materials, and organization and updating of research materials and files. In addition, the lab manager will assist in training new lab members and other research related activities.

Responsibilities:

• Preparation and submission of grant reports and other administrative documents needed for compliance.
• Preparation of materials to promote our research on digital displays and lab websites.
• Regularly update lab databases tracking publications, presentations, personnel, and other information needed for laboratory operations.
• Oversee IRB procedures and maintain confidentiality of participant information; ensures compliance with institutional, state and federal regulatory policies, procedures, directives and mandates.
• Miscellaneous laboratory management tasks such as ordering supplies and maintaining equipment.

Required Competencies:

• Strong project management skills with exceptional attention to detail.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Outstanding interpersonal skills and ability to maintain positive relationships with various stakeholders.
• Strong time management skills with a proven ability to multitask and to prioritize activities to successfully complete projects on tight deadlines with little supervision.
• Knowledge of Microsoft Office, Dropbox, and Google Drive required.
• Willingness to learn scientific formatting requirements (e.g., APA format) in preparing research materials.
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team.

Education and Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree required, preferably in Communication, Psychology, Sociology, Business, Industrial Engineering, or a social science field.
• Experience in an interdisciplinary research environment preferred.
• Experience with IRB or grant-writing preferred.

Applicants should send a cover letter, resume, and references to Michael Schultz (michael.schultz@northwestern.edu).

On July 19-21, Professor Noshir Contractor, the SONIC doctoral students Diego Gómez-Zará and Brennan Antone, and the SONIC Research Assistant Professor Alina Lungeanu presented at the 13th Annual INGRoup Conference held in Bethesda, Maryland.

Koustav Rudra presented his work on “Identifying Sub-events and Summarizing Disaster-Related Information from Microblogs” in The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. The conference was held at Ann Arbor, Michigan from 8th to 12th July, 2018.

The SONIC Ph.D. students, Kyouske Tanaka and Diego Gómez-Zará, participated at the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, in Chicago. The purpose of the Summer Institute was to bring together graduate students and early career researchers in both social science and data science. Content included live-streamed lectures from the main site at Duke University as well as guest speakers who presented on cutting-edge computational research and methods. Topics covered include text analysis, digital data collection, experimental design, non-probability sampling, agent-based modeling, and ethics.

Noshir Contractor co-authored a paper titled, “Generative Modeling of Human Behavior and Social Interactions Using Abductive Analysis”, with Yihui Ren, Vanessa Cedeno-Mieles, Zhihao Hu, Xinwei Deng, Abhjijin Adiga, Christopher Barrett, Saliya Ekanayake, Joshua Epstein, Brian Goode, Gizem Korkmaz, Christopher Kuhlman, Dustin Machi, Michael Macy, Madhav Marathe, Naren Ramakrishnan, Sekharipuram Ravi, Parang Saraf and Nathan Self.

The paper was accepted at EEE/ACM International Conference on Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2018), held in Barcelona, Spain.

Noshir Contractor’s presentation, titled “Deep Space Collaboration: Impact of Social Networks on Task Switching in Collaborative Work”, was co-authored with Alina Lungeanu, Patrick Park, and Leslie A. DeChurch.  This was presented at a NetSci 2018 satellite workshop in Paris, France on June 12, 2018.  The paper can be found here.

Noshir Contractor presents a paper (co-authored with Michael Schultz and Leslie DeChurch) titled “Communicating through space and over time” at ICA 2018, in Prague, Czech Republic.

Schultz, M., DeChurch, L., & Contractor, N. (2018, May). Communicating through space and over time. Paper to be presented at the 68th Annual ICA conference, “Voices,” Prague, Czech Republic.

Noshir Contractor’s presentation at the Computational Social Science Luncheon at Northwestern University on May 21, 2018 was titled “Some Assembly Required: Teaming in the 21st Century”.