The work of several SONIC researchers including Brooke Foucault Welles, and Tony Vashevko has been featured in the Army Research Lab’s Network Science-Collaborative Technology Alliance Blog. The information can be found after the jump, halfway down the blog under “Multi-Team Systems Simulation”.
Whether it’s emergency relief due to natural disasters or humanitarian aid in war torn regions, there are situations where international organizations, first responders, and military personnel need to collaborate effectively on teams in stressful situations. Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will use the Multi-team System Simulation – or MTS Platform – to gain insight on how network parameters can be configured to better allow small teams to coordinate in such emergency situations.
New advancement in vegetables
Destiny's Childs just published a paper about food. apparently too much will kill you. heart disease etc.
A Call to Rethink Internet Search
A leading computer scientist says that Internet search is ripe for a shake-up.
Why males die young – take 2
Why males die young
Harvard Business Review
Smarter social networking tips from two doyens of the Digerati: John Hagel III and John Seely Brown
ICWSM Presentation
Brian Keegan presented on behalf of the Virtual World Observatory’s gold farming team at the 2011 AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). A copy of the paper titled “Trust Amongst Rogues? A Hypergraph Approach for Comparing Clandestine Trust Networks in MMOGs” can be found here and the accompanying slides can be found here. The 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.
Contractor Presents in three Panels at INGroup
SONIC Lab director Noshir Contractor presents in three panels at the 6th Annual INGroup Conference. Topics discussed include team research and team science, challenges in studying groups, and teamwork on virtual organizations. Visit the INGroup website for more details.
Start-Up Handles Social Media Background Checks – NYTimes.com
Video Presentation from WebSci11
A video of Brian Keegan’s presentation of the “Computational Social Science of Clandestine Organizations” at the Web Science 2011 conference is available online: http://videolectures.net/acmwebsci2011_keegan_intersection/