Lab Director Noshir Contractor presented a Kameshwar C. Wali Lecture in the Sciences & Humanities on September 24th, 2015 at Syracuse University. His talk, entitled “Leveraging Computational Social Science to Address Grand Societal Challenges” argues that computational social science is the foundation on which to unleash intellectual insights locked in big data, illustrating how these insights offer scientists and scholars an unprecedented opportunity to engage more actively in monitoring, anticipating, and designing interventions to address grand societal challenges.
The Northwestern Alumni Association chose to highlight former SONIC Research Assistant, Neel Kunjur, for his post-college achievements at SpaceX. In his profile, Neel reflects on how his undergraduate education in McCormick prepared him to work at the cutting edge of space technology.
Noshir Contractor was featured on School of Comm’s “Creative Buzz” after leading an all-day workshop with the entire cohort of MSLCE students on November 14th. Master’s student, Zach Hyman, remarked, “For us MSLCE students, who come from a variety of different educations and locations around the world, Professor Contractor’s lessons rang true.”
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome back Brian Keegan (a Ph.D. Graduate from NU’s Media, Technology & Society program), who will present a talk on Friday, November 13th, 2015 at 1:30 PM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend.
Title
Collaboration in Bursty Information Systems: Wikipedia’s Coverage of Breaking News Events
Abstract
Bursts are characterized by a sudden onset, significant change in intensity, and temporary duration of collective social behavior. As “software eats the world” and makes critical economic and social infrastructures more interconnected, managing ever more interoperable information systems in the face of bursts will take on heightened importance. Wikipedia’s coverage of current events is a compelling context to understand how open collaborations coordinate complex, time-sensitive, and knowledge-intensive work in the absence of central authority, stable membership, clear roles, or reliable information. Using 1.1 million revisions made to 3,233 Wikipedia articles about current events between 2001 and 2011, I employ social network analysis methods to test whether the structures of high-tempo collaborations on Wikipedia articles are (a) similarly structured over time, (b) exhibit features of organizational regeneration, and (c) have similar collaboration dynamics over time. The mediation of bursty behaviors through information systems capturing detailed records enables researchers to develop richer models of the antecedents, processes, and consequences of social disruptions. This research has implications for developing organizational strategies to manage bursty behavior and suggests new directions to theorize online knowledge collaborations.
Biography
Brian Keegan is a research associate and data scientist for the Harvard Business School’s HBX online learning platform. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University’s School of Communication in 2012 and was a post-doctoral research fellow in network and computational social science at Northeastern University until 2014. His research analyzes the structure and dynamics of online knowledge collaborations such as Wikipedia, Twitter, and online education under high-tempo and bursty conditions.
Please contact Meghan McCarter with any questions or comments.
To celebrate Kits and Cats Day, SONIC Lab welcomed 14 inquisitive sophomores from Evanston Township High School to test their social network knowledge using our 6DOS dashboard. Spoiler alert, teenagers are pretty good at disseminating information! To read more about the 6DOS project in the context of the Gates Project, click here. To find out more about opportunities to get your team involved with high school outreach, check out the Office of STEM Education Partnerships here, https://osep.northwestern.edu/
October 7th, 2015, Polo Chau visited Northwestern University’s SONIC Lab to give a talk on Data Mining Meets HCI: Scalable Interactive Tools for Large Graph Sensemaking.
On September 9th, 2015, Ludo Waltman visited Northwestern University’s SONIC Lab to give a talk on Large-scale analysis of bilbliometric networks: Tools, techniques, and applications. Ludo’s full abstract, as well as the presentation, can be seen below.
Large-scale analysis of bibliometric networks: Tools, techniques, and applications
Abstract
The analysis of bibliometric networks has the potential to offer deep insights into the structure and dynamics of science. I will provide an overview of research into bibliometric network analysis at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of Leiden University. Two popular software tools for the analysis and visualization of bibliometric networks have been created at CWTS. These tools, VOSviewer (www.vosviewer.com) and CitNetExplorer (www.citnetexplorer.nl), will be demonstrated and the underlying network analysis techniques will be discussed. A number of large-scale applications of bibliometric network analysis will be presented. One application investigates the degree to which network science is evolving to become a single unified research field. Other applications are concerned with research planning and research evaluation. In these applications, bibliometric network analysis is used to identify the key research strengths of a university, to study the interdisciplinary nature of modern science, and to detect new emerging research areas.
Alina Lungeanu successfully defended her dissertation proposal titled “Assembly Mechanisms of Interdisciplinary Scientific Teams and Their Impact on Performance” on September 7th, 2015. The committee it was presented to included Noshir Contractor (chair), Darren Gergle, Brian Uzzi, Uri Wilensky, and Teresa Woodruff. Alina is currently a Research Associate at the Population Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University. Congratulations Alina!
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Ryan Boyd, who will present a talk on Wednesday, November 18th, 2015 at 10:00 AM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend.
To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Ryan Boyd please schedule a time here.
Title
A Way with Words: Language and Psychological Science in the Modern Era
Abstract
In the modern era, people generate data on a scale never before witnessed in human history. In particular, the internet creates a space where people can express their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in their own words. The language that people share inherently reflects the precise phenomena that many social scientists seek to capture and understand. However, language data can often be difficult to quantify and understand in objective, empirical terms. How can we use a person’s language to better understand their social and psychological processes? This talk provides an overview of research that illustrates just how powerful words can be for understanding a person’s mental universe. Research discussed will include topics such as psychological fingerprinting, values, mental health, and often-overlooked social processes.
Biography
Ryan Boyd is a senior graduate student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Ryan is considered to be a leading expert on natural language, big data, and social psychology. Additionally, he is the developer of various language analysis applications that have been adopted for research in over 30 countries around the world. His work has been published in top psychology journals, including Psychological Science, and has been repeatedly featured at interdisciplinary research conferences.
Please contact Meghan McCarter with any questions or comments.
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Christopher Marcum, who will present a talk on Wednesday, November 4th, 2015 at 4:00 PM in the SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building 1-459. All are welcome to attend.
To schedule a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Marcum please schedule a time here.
Title
An Ego-Centric Relational Events Model of Buffet Selection Processes in an Experimental Virtual Reality Setting
Abstract
The relational events model (REM) framework for social action (Butts 2008) has recently been demonstrated to be useful as a model of a wide range of temporally unfolding events and not just limited to the dyadic case as originally designed. The framework has shown promise, for example, in modeling ego-centric studies, as well as event histories that involve multiple event types and exogenous events (Marcum & Butts 2015). Additionally, recent work has demonstrated how careful use of support constraints within the REM framework facilitates its application in experimental designs (Tranmer et al. 2015). We extend this line of research by combining these various generalized applications of the REM in a single scenario—ego-centric event histories with multiple event types and support constraints in an experimental design.
Two hundred twenty-one overweight mothers of children between 4 and 5 were randomized to one of four feedback conditions that emphasized different health information about eating and health: 1) food safety control (Control); 2) behavioral-risk information; or 3), behavioral-risk information plus personal family health history-based risk assessment. After a short survey was administered to the participants and they were given their randomly selected feedback to read, each mother put on a head-mounted display helmet and was immersed in a virtual buffet environment. In the buffet, mothers selected from a set of virtual food and drink choices for their child’s lunch. Prior work (McBride et al. 2013) has shown that the feedback conditions deferentially impacted the total number of calories on the plate at the end of the simulation. Here, however, we evaluate whether the behavioral food selection process giving rise to those choices also differs by feedback condition.
We use the REM framework to address a simple research question: 1) to what extent do the feedback conditions shape the behavioral process unfolding during the buffet simulation? We specify sufficient statistics for both environmental and behavioral constraints on the buffet selection process. These include structural statistics for the food ordering effects and differential serving sizes, and behavioral statistics for choice inertia, “saving dessert for last” and “grazing versus browsing.” Preliminary REM results show evidence of differential preferences for the rate at which certain foodstuffs are selected, that smaller portion size drives actors to make multiple selections of the same foodstuff in a row, healthful choices are likely to precede unhealthful ones, and spatial ordering effects. Differential impacts of the feedback condition on the behavioral selection process will be discussed in the context of REM model selection.
Biography
Dr. Marcum received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California-Irvine in 2011. His dissertation research focused on health and social structural explanations of age differences in daily social interactions. His current research seeks to understand how health shapes family network processes across the life course, on the one hand, and to develop statistical models for network analysis on the other. Through his methodological work in mathematical sociology he has demonstrated expertise in modeling a wide range of social systems, including: interorganizational disaster response networks, relational events processes, epidemic dynamics, and inter-generational communication.
A recording of Christopher Marcum’s Presentation can be found here, or can be viewed below!
