The Virtual World Observatory‘s gold farming team has had their paper “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi Virtuali? Promise and Peril at the Intersection of Computational Social Science and Online Clandestine Organizations” accepted for full paper presentation at WebSci 2011 in Koblenz, Germany in June.
WINNERS IN THE DATA PRE-PROCESSING CHALLENGE (France, Complex Systems Institute of Paris Ile-de-France)
Yun Huang, Alina Lungeanu, Chuang Zhang (SONIC lab) together with their collaborators from NICO (Mike Stringer, Jonathan Haynes), and AMARAL Lab (Dan McClary, Xiaohan Zeng) are the winners for the data pre-processing challenge at Mining the Digital Traces of Science (MDTS11) International Workshop with their submission “Structured and Relational Information Extraction”.
Based on a dataset provided by Thomson ISI Web of Science, with a focus on embryology and embryonic science from 1956 to 2010, the team developed AWK and Python scripts to extract more than 30 attributes related to articles, issues, and authors and construct 16 relational tables in MySQL.
Using SQL stored procedures, users can easily extract author-publication, author-citation, co-authorship, and citation similarity relations as well as related author keywords, keyword plus, addresses, publication years, and subject categories for a subset or all authors.
The data pre-processing scripts facilitate the collaboration on designing and developing innovative tools to access scientific publication databases (such as ISI Web of Science), in order to empower users with new methods of navigation, interaction, and data visualization for this kind of databases.
MDTS11 Collaborative Challenge Winners page: http://www.iscpif.fr/tiki-index.php?page=mdtschallengewinners
ICWSM Paper Acceptance
Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, Brian Keegan, Dmitri Williams, Jaideep Srivastava, and Noshir Contractor had their paper “Trust Amongst Rogues? A Hypergraph Approach for Comparing Clandestine Trust Networks in MMOGs” accepted to the Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). Notably, it is the authors’ first attempt and acceptance for a paper invoking a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I: “A plague upon’t when thieves cannot be true one to another!” – Falstaff, II.ii
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.
Third International Workshop on Network Theory: Web Science Meets Network Science
Annenberg Networks Network, Northwestern’s SONIC lab, and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) hosted the Third International Workshop on Network Theory March 4th-6th, followed directly by the NICO Complexity Conference at Northwestern University’s Allen Center. Although the weather in Evanston turned surly, members of the SONIC lab, along with some of the most influential and brilliant scholars involved in network and web science, discussed the future of the field, major challenges, and opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. We’ll have photos available in the next couple of days (look out for a new slideshow on our homepage!) and video from the conference talks available by March 21st.
In the meantime, you can read an excellent blog post at the Complexity and Social Networks blog about a talk given by Stanley Wasserman and the discussion that followed by SONIC’s own Brian Keegan, a graduate student in the Media, Technology, and Society program. There’s also a tweet-record of the official back channel of Third International at #webnetsci.
Our sincere thanks to everyone who participated in the conference!
XRDS Article on Gold Farming
Make sure to pick up the Spring issue of the ACM XRDS magazine featuring an article “What can gold farmers teach us about criminal networks?” written by members of the VWO team!
Technology Review: Syndio Social
Technology Review, published by MIT, featured an article on Northwestern start-up Syndio Social. Syndio Social is the company co-founded by SONIC director, Noshir Contractor, and SONIC alumnus, Zachary Johnson.
To read more: http://www.technologyreview.com/business/32432/?p1=BI&a=f
SONIC paper at Canadian Communication Association-Interactivity at CBC.CA
SONIC member Ryan Whalen has had a paper accepted at the Canadian Communication Association’s annual conference – held this year as part of the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences. The paper examines commenting behavior at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s news website.
JASIST Publication Acceptance
A coauthored paper by Chunke Su and Noshir Contractor has just been accepted by Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). Congrats!
Noshir Contractor Presents at Midwest Private Equity Conference
Socnets 101: The Interconnection of People Through a Network
Recent advances in digital technologies invite consideration of organizing as a process that which is accomplished by flexible, adaptive, and ad hoc networks. A central challenge, spurred by these developments is that the nature of how we create, maintain and dissolve our knowledge networks has changed radically. Using examples from his research in a wide range of activities such as disaster response, Communities of Practice at Procter & Gamble, public health and massively multiplayer online games, Noshir Contractor will present a framework that can be used to help us leverage – Discover, Diagnose, and Design – our 21st century knowledge networks.
“The Midwest Private Equity Conference typically brings together over 150 middle market practitioners to facilitate deal flow. Along with being a forum for networking, the Conference includes updates on regulatory and legislative issues impacting middle market funds and panel discussions on how to make your funds function more effectively with advice on fundraising, management of funds, and deal trends…”
For more information: http://www.nasbic.org/page/MWPEC
SONIC Fudan Collaboration
The Chinese Marketing Research Center at Fudan University and the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Laboratory at Northwestern University have signed a strategic cooperation agreement to promote academic collaboration in research and education. The two research centers will work with Shanda Game to expand the Virtual Worlds Exploratorium (VWE) research to many Chinese online games. Professor Noshir Contractor also received the title of Honorary Professor from Fudan University on September 13th, 2010.
