Noshir Contractor presented at the International Communication Association Organizational Communication Division Junior Scholar workshop in Phoenix on May 24, 2012.
For more information go to http://www.icahdq.org/conf/2012/preconferences.asp
Contractor presents at National Cancer Institute
Noshir Contractor presented “The role of networks in the assembly of effective teams” at a National Cancer Institute meeting on The Role of Health Care Teams in Cancer Care in Bethesda, MD on May 17, 2012.
For more information, go to http://www.cvent.com/events/
Ryan Whalen to present at Argonne National Laboratory
SONIC lab member Ryan Whalen will present a talk at the Argonne National Laboratory LANS seminar series this afternoon. The talk, titled “Legal Complexity: Measuring complexity within the Supreme Court precedent network and predicting network growth” explores using network analytic techniques to help us better understand legal system development.
Larry Birnbaum to Present in the SONIC Speaker Series
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Northwestern Prof. Larry Birnbaum, who will present a talk titled “From Contextual Search to Automatic Content Generation: Scaling Human Editorial Judgment” on Monday May 21st from 11:00am-12:00pm in Frances Searle Building, Room 1.421 on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend.
About the talk
Systems that present people with information inescapably make editorial judgments in determining what information to show and how to show it. However the editorial values used to make these judgments are generally invisible to users and in many cases even to the engineers who design them. Our work is aimed at developing news and media information technologies that provide explicit and visible editorial control, at scale. Some of our most exciting work in this area is aimed at automatically generating stories from data. A system based on this technology is already generating more than 10 thousand stories weekly in areas ranging from sports, to business, to politics. This system is the nation’s most prolific and published author of, among other things, women’s collegiate softball stories. The stories compare favorably to those written by human beings.
About Larry Birnbaum
Larry Birnbaum received his PhD in computer science from Yale University in 1986, and joined the Northwestern faculty in 1989. His research in artificial intelligence and computer science has encompassed natural language processing, case-based reasoning, machine learning, human-computer interaction, educational software, and computer vision. Birnbaum has authored or coauthored more than eighty articles. He was the program co-chair of the 1991 International Machine Learning Workshop and has been a member of the program committee for numerous other conferences and workshops.
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From Contextual Search to Automatic Content Generation: Scaling Human Editorial Judgement
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SONIC Welcomes New Faculty Affiliate Michelle Shumate
We are very pleased to welcome Prof. Michelle Shumate as a faculty affiliate of the SONIC research group. Prof. Shumate, who is currently at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will join the faculty at Northwestern University in fall 2012.
Contractor, Foucault, and Young to attend Network Theory Workshop at USC
SONIC Lab members Lindsay Young, Brooke Foucault and Noshir Contractor will attend the 4th International Workshop on Network Theory jointly organized by the Annenberg Network of Networks (ANN) and SONIC Workshop on April 26-28 at the University of Southern California. The theme this year is on “Social Movements and Network Theory.”
Information and many excellent presentation videos from last year’s Network Theory Conference are available here:
http://sonic.northwestern.edu/news/events/webnetsciworkshop/
Check them out to discover what exciting science is motivating these three.
Contractor to deliver plenary address at SIAM International Conference
Contractor to deliver plenary address at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) International Conference on Data Mining in Anaheim on April 26, 2012. SIAM is a world renowned society whose mission is to build cooperation between mathematics and the worlds of science and technology through their publications, research, and community.
For more information go to: http://www.siam.org/meetings/
Catherine Shea to Present in the SONIC Speaker Series
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Duke University PhD candidate Catherine Shea. She will present her findings in a talk titled “Motivation as an Antecedent to Social Network Structure”. The talk will be on May 7th from 11:00am-12:30pm in Frances Searle Building, Room 1.421 on Northwestern’s Evanston Campus. All are welcome to attend.
Catherine is interested in experimental methods in social network research and has presented her research at various conferences and universities around the world. She received her Master of Science from Queen’s University, Canada and was a visiting scholar in the University of British Columbia in 2011.
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Goals as Antecedent to Social Network Structure
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Prof. Roger Leenders Visit
Prof. Roger Leenders from the Netherlands is visiting the SONIC lab for the entire Spring Quarter (and a few weeks beyond). Roger Leenders is Professor of Intra-Organizational Networks at Tilburg University. His research mainly focuses on the antecedents and consequences of networks in and of teams. A core research theme is the creativity of teams: what are the network drivers (and inhibitors) of the creative performance of teams?
Before moving to Tilburg, Roger was Professor of Networks in Market and Product Innovation at the University of Groningen. He has a MSc degree in Econometrics and Ph.D. in Sociology (ICS).
Dominic DiFranzo Visit
Dominic DiFranzo, PhD Student in the Department of Computer Science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Insititute is visiting the SONIC lab. Dominic works with Prof. James A. Hendler and Prof. Deborah L. McGuinness in the Tetherless World Constellation research group. Dominic’s research focuses on the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. During his visit Dominic will work on projects related to Virtual Worlds and the Semantic Web.