Advancing The Science of Networks in Communities
SONIC PhD student Jackie Ng took home the gold in the Northwestern University Computational Research Day Visualization Challenge for her presentation on Nebula, an innovative new tool that uses network science to visualize discussion board threads. For winning first place, Jackie received an NVIDIA GeForce Titan X graphics card which retails for over $1,000!
Congratulations Jackie!
El acceso a grandes volúmenes de información sobre los fenómenos sociales en general y sobre la red en particular tiene un valor extraordinario para los científicos sociales. Pero esta apasionante oportunidad debe estar acompañada de la reflexión sobre cómo los big data pueden dar lugar a nuevas teorías y métodos. Utilizando ejemplos de su investigación en el área de redes, Contractor analizará el aporte de la Ciencia de Redes al desarrollo de nuevas comprensiones a partir de grandes volúmenes de datos. Más importante aún, ilustrará cómo estas ideas ofrecen a los científicos sociales y los estudiosos de redes sociales, una oportunidad sin precedentes para participar más activamente en la supervisión, la anticipación y el diseño de intervenciones para hacer frente a los grandes desafíos sociales. – See more at: http://citep.rec.uba.ar/blog/2016/04/20/2398/#sthash.b8XUhK7X.dpuf
La conferencia se realizará el miércoles 27 de abril a las 18 hs. en Pte. J. E. Uriburu 950, entrepiso.
No se requiere inscripción previa para participar de la actividad.
Para más información, ingresar en: http://programasiglo21.rec.uba.ar
Scientists from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research used network analysis to predict Indian monsoon timing more accurately and significantly earlier. The new predictions will help farmers in the region decide when to plant their crops. As co-author Jürgen Kurths explains, “On Facebook or Twitter, you can follow how news is spreading, one posting leading to many others. In the climate system, not people but geographical regions are communicating — admittedly in a quite complex way.” The key part of the analysis was identifying regions that illustrate important warning signals and analyzing their interaction with other regions.
Read the full article here
SONIC JD/PhD candidate Ryan Whalen, along with coauthors Yun Huang (senior research associate at SONIC), Craig Tanis, Anup Sawant (senior software developer at SONIC), Brian Uzzi (SONIC affiliated faculty) and Noshir Contractor (SONIC lab director) recently published an article titled “Citation Distance: Measuring Changes in Scientific Search Strategies” in the Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web.
Abstract:
Using latent semantic analysis on the full text of scientific articles, we measure the distance between 36 million citing/cited article pairs and chart changes in citation proximity over time. The analysis shows that the mean distance between citing and cited articles has steadily increased since 1990. This demonstrates that current scholars are more likely to cite distantly related research than their peers of 20 years ago who tended to cite more proximate work. These changes coincide with the introduction of new information technologies like the Internet, and the increasing popularity of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. The “citation distance” measure shows promise in improving our understanding of the evolution of knowledge. It also offers a method to add nuance to scholarly impact measures by assessing the extent to which an article influences proximate or distant future work.
Read the full article here.
Lab Director Noshir Contractor, IEMS Professor Seyed Iravani, and SONIC PhD candidate Jackie Ng were recently awarded a unique grant from Northwestern University’s Office of the Provost and Faculty Distance Learning Workshop. Their project titled “Fostering Effective Online Discussion in Higher Education With ‘Nebula’, a Graphical Interface for Discussion Boards” was one of only nine projects to receive funding as part of an initiative to increase Northwestern’s visibility in digital and online teaching environments.
For more information on this project check out the Nebula grant page.
Click here to read a news story featuring Nebula.
Click here to read a news story featuring all of the winning proposals.
It’s the network study you’ve all been waiting for! Who is the most popular Game of Thrones character? Prof. Beveridge of Macalester College and one of his undergraduate students have calculated a number of network statistics based on the proximity of names mentioned in George R. R. Martin’s famous novels. The only question is: can these metrics help predict who is likely to meet an unfortunate end in the future? If popularity is a significant predictor then I’m not looking forward to what happens next!
Read the full article here:
Lab Director Noshir Contractor presented his talk “Some Assembly Required: Organizing in the 21st Century” during a Research Group Talk at the University of California Santa Barbara’s Department of Computer Science. Click here for a link to the event page.
Recent technological advances provide comprehensive digital traces of social actions, interactions, and transactions. These data provide an unprecedented exploratorium to model the socio-technical motivations for creating, maintaining, dissolving, and reconstituting into teams. Using examples from research on scientific collaboration, software development and massively multiplayer online games, Contractor will argue that Network Science serves as the foundation for the development of social network theories and methods to help advance our ability to understand the emergence of effective teams. More importantly, he will argue that these insights will also enable effective teams by building a new generation of recommender systems that leverage our research insights on the socio-technical motivations for creating ties.
In a recent article entitled “Nine faculty groups to receive grants for digital and online technology,” the Daily Northwestern singled out lab members Noshir Contractor, Seyed Iravani, and Jacqueline Ng for their work “designing Nebula, which is a graphical and networked discussion board to generate meaningful discussion and improve learning retention in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)”.
Read the full article HERE.
Dan Newman is spending his sabbatical at SONIC doing research on team assembly, in collaboration with Marlon Twyman, Leslie DeChurch, and Noshir Contractor. These projects investigate how individuals get selected to join teams, on the basis of individual experience and demographics, past relationships, and endogenous network effects.
The Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics reports on a recent study by a team of scientists from DCB, UNIL, SIB, CHUV, MIT and Harvard. The team tracked the social networks of genes disrupted in complex diseases. Taking inspiration from social networks, the researchers applied techniques similar to those used in SNA to gain information about users (i.e. discrete genes) on the basis of their interconnections. After constructing accurate “maps” of gene networks for about 400 different human cell and tissue types, the team found that disease variants often affect groups of genes that were densely interconnected within regulatory networks. Furthermore, the affected network components precisely pinpointed with cell types or tissues that are implicated in disease processes. This finding confirms their hypothesis that genetic variants may impact genes that are connected within regulatory networks of tissues that are specific to certain diseases.