SONIC is always committed to attracting great people to work with us. These weeks are busy with graduate recruitment events, as the applicants for the next academic year are making the final decisions about where to pursue their graduate studies. We presented four posters in the Frances Searle Building at the School of Communication recruitment showcase for the Media, Technology, and Society (MTS) and the Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) Ph.D. programs. SONIC exhibited four projects: Network Cognition; Text Analytics for Evaluated Shared Cognition; on finding a Dream Team; and using simulations to explore team composition and functioning. Our ATLAS collaborators displayed three posters on their projects exploring leadership, team cognition, and multi-team systems.

On February 13, 2017 Noshir Contractor presented on Bridging the Boundary, while Minding the Seams: Boundary Propensities in Multiteam Systems in a colloquium held at the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization, Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University, CA.

SONIC and ATLAS members: eight graduate students, one undergraduate researcher, and two post-doctoral researchers attended the NASA Human Research Program Investigators’ Workshop in Galveston, TX from January 23rd – January 26th.

Our team, together with our collaborators at DePaul, was showcasing eleven posters and presenting on three panels.

You can see the seven SONIC and ATLAS posters here:

Gabe Plummer: The Costs of Switching Between Team and Multiteam Tasks and The Role of Shared Cognition

Brennan Antone: Faulty Analysis: Analyzing Different Faultline Measurement Algorithms for Long-Duration Space Exploration

Zach Gibson: Building Extreme Teams: Simulating team Composition Effects in Isolated and Confined Environments

Patrick Park: Understanding Elective Task Switching

Ashley Niler:  Impact of Social Connectedness, Communication Delay, and Sleep Deprivation on Cognitive Network Similarity in Analog Teams

Ilya Gokhman: Leadership Networks in Space Crews

Igor Zakhlebin: Influence of Interpersonal Perceptions on Team Structure in Long-Duration Space Exploration Missions

On Sunday, December 4th, a SONIC PhD candidate Aaron Schecter and Professor Noshir Contractor presented at a workshop titled “The Network Science of Squads“, held in Denton, TX on December 3rd – 5th.

An illustration of the relational event model to analyze group interaction processes

Abstract

A fundamental assumption in the study of groups is that they are constituted by various interaction processes that are critical to survival, success, and failure. However, there are few methods available sophisticated enough to empirically analyze group interaction. To address this issue, we present an illustration of relational event modeling (REM). A relational event is a “discrete event generated by a social actor and directed toward one or more targets.” Because REM provides a procedure for modeling relational event histories, it has the ability figure out which patterns of group interaction are more or less common than others. For instance, do past patterns of interaction influence future interactions, (e.g., reciprocity), do individual attributes make it more likely that individuals will create interactions (e.g., homophily), and do specific contextual factors influence interaction patterns (e.g., a complexity of a task)? The current presentation provides an REM tutorial from a multi-team system experiment in which two teams navigated a terrain to coordinate their movement to arrive a common destination point. We use REM to model the dominant patterns of interactions, which included the principle of inertia (i.e., past contacts tended to be future contacts) and trust (i.e., group members interacted with members they trusted more) in the current example.

On December 1st, 2016, Noshir Contractor presented on Leveraging Computational Social Science to Address Grand Societal Challenges. The symposium, titled “Understanding social systems via computational approaches and new kinds of data”, took place from November 30 – December 1, 2016 at KOMED im MediaPark, Cologne, Germany

The complete schedule of presentations and Noshir’s talk abstract can be viewed following the link below:

http://www.gesis.org/css-wintersymposium/program/schedule/