The Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) – Page 36 – Advancing The Science of Networks in Communities

Students’ social interactions and daily routines to make predictions about freshman retention

2018-03-08 No Comments

Sudha Ram’s Smart Campus research tracks students’ social interactions and daily routines via their CatCard usage — and leverages that information to make predictions about freshman retention. The goal of Ram’s Smart Campus research is to help educational institutions repurpose the data already being captured from student ID cards to identify those most at risk for not returning after their first year of college. Ram found that social integration and routine were stronger predictors than end-of-term grades, which is one of the more traditionally used predictors of freshman retention in higher education.

Read the article here.

SONIC News

SONIC’s paper published in Communication Methods and Measures

2018-03-05 No Comments

A paper co-authored by SONIC’s Alina Lungeanu, Noshir Contractor, ATLAS’ Leslie DeChurch, and UGA’s Dorothy Carter was published in the journal Communication Methods and Measures.

Lungeanu, A., Carter, D. R., DeChurch, L. A., & Contractor, N. S. (2018). How Team Interlock Ecosystems Shape the Assembly of Scientific Teams: A Hypergraph Approach. Communication Methods and Measures, 1-25.

SONIC News

SONIC presents at the Organizational Science Winter Conference in Utah

2018-03-01 No Comments

SONIC members, Jacqueline Ng and Noshir Contractor, are coauthors along with Leslie DeChurch (ATLAS, Northwestern) and Paul Leonardi (UCSB) of “The Sociomateriality of Teamwork” presented at the Organizational Science Winter Conference on the theme “Technology and the Modern Organization” on March 2nd, 2018 in Park City, Utah.

SONIC News

SONIC hosts a Relational Event Modeling research incubator

2018-02-26 No Comments

SONIC hosted a Relational Event Modeling research incubator on Feb 23rd and Feb 24th where 10 researchers from the US Army Research Lab, Stanford, University of Georgia, Purdue and Northwestern discussed how recent advances in relational event modeling can be leveraged to address their research questions and how novel research questions can in turn prompt methodological advances in relational event modeling.

Networks in the News

Similar neural responses predict friendship

2018-02-22 No Comments

By Carolyn Parkinson, Adam M. Kleinbaum, & Thalia Wheatley

Human social networks are overwhelmingly homophilous: individuals tend to befriend others who are similar to them in terms of a range of physical attributes (e.g., age, gender). Do similarities among friends reflect deeper similarities in how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the world? To test whether friendship, and more generally, social network proximity, is associated with increased similarity of real-time mental responding, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan subjects’ brains during free viewing of naturalistic movies. Here we show evidence for neural homophily: neural responses when viewing audiovisual movies are exceptionally similar among friends, and that similarity decreases with increasing distance in a real-world social network. These results suggest that we are exceptionally similar to our friends in how we perceive and respond to the world around us, which has implications for interpersonal influence and attraction.

Read the article here.

SONIC News

Noshir Contractor delivered a keynote address at the Computational Communication Science conference

2018-02-21 No Comments

Noshir Contractor delivered a keynote titled “Combining Big Data and Conventional Methods” at the Computational Communication Science conference, on February 16th in Hanover, Germany.

SONIC News

SONIC welcomes Cristina Casareale

2018-02-09 No Comments

SONIC welcomes Cristina Casareale, a visiting Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Protection at the Università Politecnica delle Marche (Ancona, Italy). During her 6 month visit, Cristina will work with SONIC to study the networks among the key players involved in response to the 2012 Costa Concordia maritime disaster.

Networks in the News

Social influence and discourse similarity networks in workgroups

2018-02-08 No Comments

by Johanne Saint-Charles and Pierre Mongeau

Adopting a socio-semantic perspective, this study aims to verify the relation between social influence and discourse similarity networks in workgroups and explore its modification over time. Data consist of video transcripts of 45, 3-h group meetings and weekly sociometric questionnaires. Relation between tie strength, actor centrality within the influence network, and shared elements of discourse between group members are examined over time. Observed correlations support the hypothesis of a relation between social influence and discourse similarity. Changes over time suggest a similarity threshold above which the relation between similarity and influence is reversed.

Read the full article here.

SONIC News

SONIC will present at the ICA in May 2018

2018-02-05 No Comments

Two SONIC papers will be presented at the 68th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association in Prague, the Czech Republic on the 24-28 of May 2018.

Tanaka, K., DeChurch, L., & Contractor, N. (2018, May). Origins of omission and commission errors in perceptions of group communication networks.

Schultz, M., DeChurch, L., & Contractor, N. (2018, May). Communicating through space and over time.

Also, Noshir will participate on a panel titled “Professor as entrepreneur: opportunities and risk.” The title of his presentation is Why inhaling digital exhaust is taking organizational performance and the science of communication and technology to new highs.

News

SONIC-collaborated paper to be presented at the 3rd Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Leadership Symposium

2018-02-05 No Comments

A paper, co-authored by Noshir Contractor will be presented at the 3rd Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Leadership Symposium, to be held on May 10-12th in Chania, Greece. The Symposium theme is “What leaders actually do.”

Mesmer-Magnus, J., Niler, A., DeChurch, L.A., & Contractor, N.S. (2018, May). Working and leading the way to Mars: How work affects shared leadership. Paper to be presented at the 3rd Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Leadership Symposium, Chania, Greece.