Advancing The Science of Networks in Communities
SONIC lab Director Noshir Contractor will be presenting Friday, September 30th, at the Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN) at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
The title of Contractor’s presentation will is “Using Web Science to Understand and Enable 21st Century Networks”.
For more details on this workshop, go to http://winworkshop.net/index.php.
Two SONIC lab PhD researchers will present at this weekend’s Organizational Communication Mini Conference at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Alina Lungeanu is presenting a paper titled “A network perspective on success in collaboration: Stop citing me for your own good?” exploring patterns of scientific collaboration. Ryan Whalen will present “Government structure as multiplex network: Improving our understanding of inter-organizational relations” in which he explores ways to map and understand government structure.
On Tuesday, September 13, Alina Lungeanu and Curie Chang will be presenting the following video poster at the 2011 Oncofertility Consortium® Conference – “Priorities for Sustainable Oncofertility Research and Patient Care”. The video features Oncofertility Consortium founder Theresa Woodruff, SONIC Lab director Noshir Contractor, and researchers Alina Lungeanu, Curie Chang, and Mengxiao Zhu speaking about how research in the Oncofertility discipline started and how it has evolved over the years.
Professor Maria Binz-Scharf will be presenting “Collaborative Production of Scientific Knowledge” on Thursday, September 15, 2011 10:30-11:30 a.m.
Research scientists have become increasingly dependent on collaborations across laboratories and organizations to maintain their productivity. However, growing specialization of individual laboratories works against a current drive towards understanding systems in the sciences. Consequently, there is a tension between the rising importance of collaborative efforts and the practical and structural challenges in establishing and managing such collaborations in the quest to understand our world. Drawing on ethnographic case studies of three academic research labs, we illustrate how scientific knowledge is produced in collaborations that are established and maintained through virtual organizations (VOs). As much as VOs can facilitate scientific work across time and space, they do not eradicate the social aspects (e.g. trust among scientists, institutional limitations, laboratory cultures) to scientific knowledge production.
Maria Binz-Scharf is Associate Professor of Management at the City College of CUNY, and Visiting Researcher at Xerox PARC. Her research examines how individuals search for and share knowledge to accomplish work. In particular, she is interested in understanding the role technology plays in processes of knowledge sharing and innovation. With the support of grants from the NSF and NIH, she has studied the knowledge networks of biologists, primary care physicians, and DNA forensic scientists.
Download the flyer here.
[line]
[line]
SONIC lab collaborator Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Ph. D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and Hugh Devlin, Yun Huang, and Director Noshir Contractor of the SONIC lab, had a paper entitled “Expert Recommendation based on Social Drivers, Social Network Analysis, and Semantic Data Representation” accepted by the 2nd International Workshop on Information Heterogeneity and Fusion in Recommender Systems (HetRec 2011) held as part of the 5th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2011).
Brian Keegan presented Virtual World Observatory research at the ACM Web Science and AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) this summer. Video lectures of these presentations and the slide decks are now available:
Web Science: http://videolectures.net/
ICWSM: http://videolectures.net/
The work of several SONIC researchers including Brooke Foucault Welles, and Tony Vashevko has been featured in the Army Research Lab’s Network Science-Collaborative Technology Alliance Blog. The information can be found after the jump, halfway down the blog under “Multi-Team Systems Simulation”.
Whether it’s emergency relief due to natural disasters or humanitarian aid in war torn regions, there are situations where international organizations, first responders, and military personnel need to collaborate effectively on teams in stressful situations. Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will use the Multi-team System Simulation – or MTS Platform – to gain insight on how network parameters can be configured to better allow small teams to coordinate in such emergency situations.
Brian Keegan presented on behalf of the Virtual World Observatory’s gold farming team at the 2011 AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). A copy of the paper titled “Trust Amongst Rogues? A Hypergraph Approach for Comparing Clandestine Trust Networks in MMOGs” can be found here and the accompanying slides can be found here. The abstract:
Gold farming and real money trade refer to a set of illicit practices in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) whereby players accumulate virtual resources to sell for ―real world‖ money. Prior work has examined trade relationships formed by gold farmers but not the trust relationships which exist between members of these organizations. We adopt a hypergraph approach to model the multi-modal relationships of gold farmers granting other players permission to use and modify objects they own. We argue these permissions reflect underlying trust relationships which can be analyzed using network analysis methods. We compare farmers’ trust networks to the trust networks of both unidentified farmers and typical players. Our results demonstrate that gold farmers’ networks are different from trust networks of normal players whereby farmers trust highly-central non-farmer players but not each other. These findings have implications for augmenting detection methods and re-evaluating theories of clandestine behavior.
SONIC Lab director Noshir Contractor presents in three panels at the 6th Annual INGroup Conference. Topics discussed include team research and team science, challenges in studying groups, and teamwork on virtual organizations. Visit the INGroup website for more details.
A video of Brian Keegan’s presentation of the “Computational Social Science of Clandestine Organizations” at the Web Science 2011 conference is available online: http://videolectures.net/acmwebsci2011_keegan_intersection/