Lab Director, Noshir Contractor, presented on a panel titled Issues of Social Media and Social Networks for the Communication of Science Related to Contentious Societal Issues at the National Academies of Science’s Committee on the Science of Science Communication: A Research Agenda in Washington DC on February 24th, 2016.

Full Citation:
Contractor, N (February, 2016). Presented on a panel titled Issues of Social Media and Social Networks for the Communication of Science Related to Contentious Societal Issues at the National Academies of Science’s Committee on the Science of Science Communication: A Research Agenda, Washington DC.

Event Website:
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/meetingview.aspx?MeetingId=8435

Lab Director, Noshir Contractor delivered a talk entitled “Team Science for the 21st Century” as an invited speaker at the 3rd Kavli Symposium on Science Journalism in Washington DC on February 15th, 2016.

Full Citation:
Contractor, N. (February 15, 2016). Team Science for the 21st Century. Evening Speaker, 3rd Kavli Symposium on Science Journalism, Washington, DC.

Event Website:
http://wfsj.org/v2/kavli-symposium/

On February 23r, 2016, Charles “Chick” Macal visited SONIC Lab to present “Simulating Chicago (and Everyone in It)” as part of the SONIC Speaker Series. Dr. Macal’s full abstract and presentation can be viewed below.

Abstract:

chiSIM, the Chicago Social Interaction Model, is an agent-based model of people and places in Chicago along with the daily activities in which residents engage. To support planning and policy making, chiSIM models the behaviors and social interactions of all Chicago residents, represented in the model at the individual level. Places consist of geo-located parcels in the city, such as households, schools, workplaces, hospitals, and general quarters, such as nursing homes, dormitories, jails, etc. During the course of a simulated day, agents move from place to place, hour by hour, engaging in social activities and interactions with co-located agents. Examples of applications for this model include forecasting socially mediated processes, such as the spread of infectious diseases and the adoption of new technologies; measuring the potential effectiveness of public health and social programs and interventions; and assessing population-wide energy usage.

Full talk with presentation slides:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/OPkDJ7Z1Gcw

“An illustration of the relational event model to analyze group interaction processes” by lab members Noshir Contractor and Aaron Schecter and collaborators Andrew Pilny and Marshall Scott Poole was accepted for publication in the upcoming issue of Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice. The article applies relational event modeling to interaction processes and argues that “both emergent properties and performance are consequences of complex group interaction processes that happen in real time. As such, group process should not be treated as aggregations of interactions or simple psychological constructs.”

You can read a copy of the accepted manuscript here.

Follow Dr. Contractor on Research Gate to be notified when the published version becomes available and for updates on his future publications: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Noshir_Contractor

Full Citation:
Pilny, A., Schecter, A., Poole, M. S., & Contractor, N. (in press). An illustration of the relational event model to analyze group interaction processes. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice.

Along with collaborators from Georgia Tech, Noshir Contractor, Eric Forbush, Ivan Hernandez, and Marlon Twyman presented posters for the INERTIA, CREWS, and SCALE projects at NASA’s 2016 Human Research Program Investigator’s Workshop in Galveston, TX on February 9th, 2016.

Along with collaborators Cheng Zhang, Chee Wei Phang, Ximeng Wang, and Yunjie Xu at Fudan University and Xiaohua Zeng at College of City University of Hong Kong, Noshir’s and Yun’s article “Circadian Rhythms in Socializing Propensity” was published in PLOS One on September 09, 2015.

Abstract: Using large-scale interaction data from a virtual world, we show that people’s propensity to socialize (forming new social connections) varies by hour of the day. We arrive at our results by longitudinally tracking people’s friend-adding activities in a virtual world. Specifically, we find that people are most likely to socialize during the evening, at approximately 8 p.m. and 12 a.m., and are least likely to do so in the morning, at approximately 8 a.m. Such patterns prevail on weekdays and weekends and are robust to variations in individual characteristics and geographical conditions.

Read more here: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0136325

Lab Director, Noshir Contractor, participated in the closing panel, “Reflections: Lessons learned,” for the 22nd Annual Organization Science Winter Conference: Innovations & Organizations on February 7th, 2016, alongside Natalya Vinokurova (Wharton), Todd Zenger (University of Utah), Martin Schulz (British Columbia at Vancouver).

Lab Director Noshir Contractor presented his lecture “Leveraging Network Science to Address Grand Societal Challenges” on Jan. 15th, 2016 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, sponsored jointly by the Interdisciplinary Committee on Organizational Studies (ICOS) and the Digital Future Lecture Series. Using examples of his research in the area of networks, Noshir illustrated how Network Science is fundamental to unleashing the intellectual insights locked in big data. Specifically, he discussed 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.

Glamour Magazine profiles CREWS Grant collaborator Suzanne Bell and a number of other female professionals contributing to NASA’s upcoming Mars Mission in the article “Would You Go to Mars? Meet the Four Women Astronauts Who Can’t Wait to Go”. Read the full article here: http://www.glamour.com/inspired/2016/01/nasa-women-astronauts-first-trip-to-mars