Network Canvas Team Wins 2025 William D. Richards, Jr. Software Award
Noshir Contractor Hosts Julia Neidhardt for Talk on Human-Centered Recommender Systems
On June 9, SONIC Lab and Noshir Contractor were thrilled to welcome back Professor Julia Neidhardt of Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien), who gave a compelling lecture titled “Human-Centered Recommender Systems: Bridging User Modeling and Digital Humanism.” This event was a special homecoming for Prof. Neidhardt, who was a visiting scholar at SONIC during her doctoral studies.
Now an Assistant Professor at TU Wien’s Research Unit for Data Science, Prof. Neidhardt’s work spans recommender systems, user modeling, tourism informatics, and online opinion formation. Her scholarship appears in top-tier journals like Nature Human Behaviour, and she holds leadership roles across major international conferences and editorial boards, including RecSys, UMAP, ENTER, and ACM TORS.
We’re honored to have hosted her again and grateful for her continued contributions to the SONIC community and beyond.
Learn more about Prof. Neidhardt’s work: https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/people/julia-neidhardt
Research Presented at 2024 SIOP Conference
Last week, SONIC Director Noshir Contractor was joined by Alina Lungeanu, Leslie DeChurch, and Megan Chan to present research papers in a session at the 2024 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Annual Conference. The research included “Crossing Boundaries in Space Exploration Multiteam Systems”, “The Impact of Communication Delay in Cognitive Coordination and Problem-Solving Performance in Spaceflight Multiteam Systems”, “Leadership Signatures in Spaceflight Multiteam Systems”, and “The Tyranny of Twos.” Congratulations to all who presented!
Noshir Contractor to Give Presentation at Indian Institute of Mass Communication
Tomorrow, April 2nd, SONIC Director Noshir Contractor will be giving a special lecture for the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi’s Department of English Journalism. Prof. Contractor’s presentation is titled “Leveraging Network Science and Big Data to Address Grand Societal Challenges” and will take place from 3-5pm at Mahatma Gandhi Manch. 
SONIC Speaker Series Presents: David Krackhardt
Video now available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fqhdkwKdkSU?feature=shared
SONIC is proud to welcome Professor David Krackhardt of Carnegie Mellon University to speak on Power and Networks in Organizations.
David Krackhardt
Professor of Organizations and Public Policy
Carnegie Mellon University Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, Joint Appointment with The Tepper School of Business
To learn more about the speaker, please visit: https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/faculty-research/profiles/krackhardt-davidm
Introducing: The SONIC Team Fall 2023
We have no shortage of work to do and projects to complete here at SONIC. Luckily, we have the best team behind us! This quarter, our entire SONIC team meets together once a week to discuss current happenings, give progress updates, and encourage team bonding. We are so grateful to have our team’s combined expertise, and we can’t wait to see the achievements and successes this coming year brings!
Preston Colloquium with Noshir Contractor
SONIC Director Noshir Contractor will be the first Ivan Preston Colloquium speaker of this academic year at UW-Madison. His talk, “People Analytics: Using Digital Exhaust from the Web to Leverage Network Insights in the Algorithmically Infused Workplace,” will take place on Monday, October 9, 2023. The discussion will present empirical examples to demonstrate how people analytics can be leveraged to mine data created by individuals in their digital transactions to address challenges they face with issues such as team assembly and team conflict. Professor Contractor’s colloquium is the first of five talks that the university will host this year.
SONIC Welcomes Visiting Researcher Pavel Krivitsky
Over the past few weeks, SONIC has had the honor of hosting Dr. Pavel Krivitsky, expert on social network analysis from the University of New South Wales Sydney. While in Evanston, Dr. Krivitsky discussed social network research and his own discoveries of methods and models for analyzing complex network data and processes. We thank Dr. Krivitsky for his visit and for sharing his expertise!
Welcome to SONIC, Megan & Brian!
SONIC is excited to introduce Megan Chan and Brian Bogert. Megan and Brian are joining SONIC as a first-year Ph.D. student in the Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences (IEMS) program this coming Fall.
Megan Chan received her Bachelor of Science in Industiral Engineering from California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. Upon graduation, she worked as a technology consultant at Protiviti, where she provided enterprise software implementation technical and advisory services. Her research interests include organizational communication, optimization, network analysis, and data science. Outside of work, she loves picking up new skills. She enjoys dance (ballet, contemporary, hip hop) and martial arts. She is passionate about sustainability, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and she is striving to be an ally, a mentor, and a leader wherever she can.
Brian Bogert will be receiving his Bachelor’s from Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University. As a double major in Industrial & Systems Engineering and Political Science, Brian is a huge proponent of interdisciplinary studies. He is especially interested in the science behind teams and how it relates to the public sector. One dream he has is to incorporate decision analysis and operations research to improve efficiency within the federal bureaucracy. Outside of school, he loves listening to music, watching baseball, and looking up random facts about roller coasters or whatever else he feels like searching.
Both Megan and Brian are excited to start their journey in Academia with SONIC — and we’re very excited to have them on board!
SONIC would also like to wish our SONIC Alumni the best of luck with their new careers!
Balint Neray recently concluded his post-doctoral position at SONIC in February. At SONIC, Balint worked on several projects, including the Social Influence, Family Planning in Kenya, as well as the Hierarchical Multidimensional Network-based Approach for Multi-Competitor Product Design. Balint’s work focuses on the analysis of ego-centric networks and how it is essential in understanding various social phenomena. After SONIC, Balint is joining Facebook as a Research Scientist.
Last month, Kyosuke Tanaka successfully defended his dissertation. At SONIC, Kyosuke heads the 6DoS (6 Degrees of Separation) Project and worked on Threadless and the SCALE Project. Kyosuke’s work focuses on understanding how and why people perceive, activate, and leverage their social contacts. After SONIC, Kyosuke is joining the Department of Management at Aarhus University for a 3-year postdoc on a project titled Patterns of Interaction: Emergence and Consequences.
The SONIC Research Group thanks Balint and Kyosuke for all of their hard work during their time at SONIC and wishes them all the best in their career!
New NASA Grant on TEAMSTaR!
Excited to share that we received a new grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to develop and validate a team composition decision support system to assist NASA during crew member selection.
Congratulations!
Congratulations to the Network Canvas Team — winners of the 2025 William D. Richards, Jr. Software Award!
This award honors lifetime achievement in creating publicly available social network analysis software that transforms how we study and understand networks.
The Network Canvas Team developed a free, open-source tool for social network data collection, making groundbreaking research more accessible to the scholarly community.
Team members: Kate Banner, Michelle Birkett, Caden Buckhalt, Noshir Contractor, Bernie Hogan, Patrick Janulis, Joshua Melville, and Gregory Phillips II.