Advancing The Science of Networks in Communities
One of the SONIC papers, presented at the 67th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) on May 25-29 in San Diego, CA., received a Top 4 Paper Award in the Organizational Communication Division.
Fu, Sophia, Shumate, Michelle, & Contractor, Noshir. Collective Innovation Adoption across Interorganizational Systems: Organizational Boundary, Social Networks, and Decision-Making Status.
Nebula was selected as a finalist for the IMS Global Consortium Learning Impact Award that was held on May 16-19 2017. Most of the competition was professional educational tech applications. See the full list of Winners of the 2017 Learning Impact Awards here, where Nebula is listed among the 2017 Honorable Mentions.
Congratulations to Jackie Ng and Noshir Contractor – SONIC contributors to Nebula!
Nebula is a Northwestern alternative to the standard Canvas discussion board. Nebula is a hybrid type of learning tool that at once offers analytic visualization of complex discussion dynamics and invites participation in that dynamic by having users contribute posts and comments directly to the discussion graph. Its visual approach is very intuitive to understand and use, promoting more rapid and frequent student engagement in the discussions.
On May 28th, the Ph.D. student Diego Gómez-Zará presented his research on social movements at the 67th conference of the International Communication Association (ICA). This year, the conference was hosted in San Diego, USA. Diego presented on “The Role of Social Movement Organizations in Twitter: Evidence From the Chilean Student Movement.” By using a mixed-methods approach, incorporating network analysis, sentiment analysis, and content analysis, the study identifies differences in how social movements’ information flow, network position, and attitudes evolve.
On may 30th, 2017 Leslie DeChurch will present at the Mars Mission Social Sciences Workshop at the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute in Cape Canaveral, FL. The title of her paper, co-authored with Noshir Contractor and Michael Schultz, is SCALE: Shared cognitive architecture for long-term exploration.
Noshir Contractor and two SONIC graduate students: Diego Gomez Zara, and Zachary Gibson are going to present at the 67th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) on May 25-29 in San Diego, CA.
One of the papers, co-authored by Noshir Contractor, will be presented at the Top Paper Panel for the Organizational Communication Division:
On May 18, 2017 SONIC Director Noshir Contractor gave a Gerald P. Mohrmann Memorial Lecture on Leveraging Computational Social Science to Address Grand Societal Challenges.
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 the area of networks, 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.
On Friday, April 28th, Noshir and Leslie presented a paper Exploring New Frontiers: Building Better Teams on Earth and Beyond in a symposium at the 2017 SIOP conference in Orlando, Florida.
Jacqueline Ng, Brennan Antone, Zachary Gibson, Suzanne T. Bell, Leslie A. DeChurch, Noshir Contractor: Crew Recommender for Effective Work in Space: CREWS
The prospect of sending a team to Mars by the year 2030 challenges organizational scientists to build new conceptual lenses and leverage advanced analytic and computational methods to hasten understanding and prediction of team performance. This symposium showcases 5 recent advances, all inspired by the challenge of space exploration.
Noshir Contractor gave the opening keynote address at the 5th Annual Network Leadership Training Academy, titled “Building and Leveraging Powerful Social Networks” on April 26th. The Academy is organized by the Center on Network Science at the University of Colorado, Denver. For more details, see http://bit.ly/NLTA2017.
We welcome back Noshir Contractor to the Northwestern University campus after spending the 2017 Winter Quarter as the Distinguished WTO Visiting Scholar at the Center for Work, Technology, & Organizations (WTO) in the Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University’s School of Engineering. For more details, please see here.