Noshir Contractor gave the opening keynote address at the 5th Annual Network Leadership Training Academy, titled “Building and Leveraging Powerful Social Networks” on April 26th. The Academy is organized by the Center on Network Science at the University of Colorado, Denver. For more details, see http://bit.ly/NLTA2017.
Welcome back on campus, Noshir!
We welcome back Noshir Contractor to the Northwestern University campus after spending the 2017 Winter Quarter as the Distinguished WTO Visiting Scholar at the Center for Work, Technology, & Organizations (WTO) in the Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University’s School of Engineering. For more details, please see here.
SONIC PhD candidate Jackie Ng’s paper judged as one of the best accepted papers at AOM 2017
“Teaming at the Limit: Enhancing Team Effectiveness with Enterprise Social Media Affordances”, a paper written by SONIC lab member, Jackie Ng, in collaboration with Noshir Contractor, Paul Leonardi & Leslie DeChurch, was judged to be one of the best accepted papers (top 10%) in the 2017 Academy of Management Meeting taking place in Atlanta Georgia, August 4-8. This high honor entitles the paper to be published in the Proceedings of the 2017 AoM Meeting.
Brennan Antone will join SONIC as a PhD student in Fall 2017
Currently, Brennan is working in SONIC as an undergraduate research assistant. He is an invaluable member of the CREWS project team.
Brennan will be entering the PhD program in Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences at Northwestern University in Fall 2017, and will continue to work with SONIC in his new role. He is the recipient of a Harold Richards Graduate Fellowship for researchers in organization theory and systems analysis. Congratulations to Brennan!
ANN-SONIC 8th International Workshop on Network Theory, 2017
The 8th ANN-SONIC International Workshop on Network Theory is being held at the University of Southern California (USC) on March 23-24, 2017. The theme this year is “Wisdom in Networks.”
For details on program, speakers the participants for this invitational workshop please see this link.
SONIC and ATLAS students presented three posters at the workshop:
Kyosuke Tanaka, Mo Ran, Jeremy Piech, & Noshir Contractor, Follow the Crowds? A Quasi-Experimental Study of “Social Signal” Effects on Online Design Ratings.
Jacqueline Ng, Leslie A. DeChurch, & Noshir S. Contractor, Information Sharing in Virtual Teams: How Group Information Processing Norms Affect Online Team Discussions.
Lindsay Larson, Diego Gomez-Zara, Benjamin Jones, Leslie DeChurch, & Noshir Contractor, The Language of Leadership Networks in Multiteam Systems.
The workshop is being organized by the Annenberg Networks Network (ANN) at the University of Southern California, the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research group at the Northwestern University.
Noshir Contractor appointed as a member of Decadal Survey of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Applications to National Security Committee
This new project will carry out a decadal survey on the social and behavioral sciences (SBS) in areas relevant to national security. The survey will identify opportunities that are poised to contribute significantly to the intelligence community’s analytic responsibilities. Please follow the link for the full statement of task.
The first meeting for the Decadal Survey of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Applications to National Security will be held March 23 – March 24, 2017 in Washington, DC.
Noshir Contractor gave a distinguished lecture at CITEP in Buenos Aires, Argentina
On March 13th Noshir Contractor gave a distinguished lecture titled “Some Assembly required: Organizing in the 21st century”. The event was organized by the Center for Technological and Pedagogical Innovation (CITEP – Centro de Innovación en Tecnología y Pedagogía) of the University of Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Noshir presented research on creating effective teams and demonstrated MyDreamTeam, a web-based teaming platform used to understand and facilitate the formation of teams in educational contexts.
Eric Forbush, a former SONIC member, was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Congratulations to Eric Forbush, former SONIC Lab Manager and a post-baccalaureate researcher! Eric is now a graduate student at PENN, studying towards his PhD at the Annenberg School of Communication.
For the 2017 competition, NSF received over 13,000 applications, and made 2,000 award offers. We are proud of Eric for having received this prestigious award!
Global patterns of synchronization in human communications
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Social media are transforming global communication and coordination and provide unprecedented opportunities for studying socio-technical domains. Here we study global dynamical patterns of communication on Twitter across many scales. Underlying the observed patterns is both the diurnal rotation of the Earth, day and night, and the synchrony required for contingency of actions between individuals. We find that urban areas show a cyclic contraction and expansion that resembles heartbeats linked to social rather than natural cycles. Different urban areas have characteristic signatures of daily collective activities. We show that the differences detected are consistent with a new emergent global synchrony that couples behaviour in distant regions across the world. Although local synchrony is the major force that shapes the collective behaviour in cities, a larger-scale synchronization is beginning to occur.
Snap: Rewriting ‘Art of War’ for social networking — by not documenting anything
Social networks may be the most valuable and durable types of businesses powered by “network effects,” the phenomenon of products or services becoming more powerful the more people use them.
The social-networking companies in our recently launched Network Effect Index — a group of current and formerly public consumer-Web companies valued at $1 billion or more — outperformed the S&P by over 170 percent in the last five years, the most of any business category in the index.
This is one reason the imminent IPO of social/mobile app Snap, which thrives on network effects, is being so closely watched. Another is that Snap — the parent of the ragingly popular Snapchat service, and a company expected to be valued at roughly $20 billion at its offering — represents the first credible threat to the Facebook social-networking colossus. Interestingly, Snap has grown by following a path very different than Facebook’s — so much so that we believe Snap ultimately could be valued less like a traditional social network and more like a hardware-software company, like Apple, or a media business, like Comcast.
Read the full article here.