The Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) – Page 49 – Advancing The Science of Networks in Communities

Noshir Speaks at the University of California Santa Barbara’s Department of Computer Science

2016-04-12 No Comments

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.

Abstract

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.

SONIC News

SONIC Researchers highlighted by the Daily Northwestern for work on MOOCs

2016-04-07 No Comments

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.

SONIC News

SONIC Lab welcomes Dan Newman for his sabbatical research

2016-04-07 No Comments

Faculty_Newman — Daniel A. Newman Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, School of Labor & Employment Relations University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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.

Networks in the News

“Tracking the Social Networks of Genes Disrupted in Complex Diseases”

2016-03-31 No Comments

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.

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The study also points to significant implications in future medical treatments: the accurate maps of gene networks for different tissues will likely advance our understandings of how diseases start and progress, and will facilitate in the design of targeted treatments in personalized medicine settings in the future.

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You can read Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics’ report here: http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2016/03/tracking-social-networks-genes-disrupted-complex-diseases.

SONIC News

Noshir speaks at Lambda Pi Eta Choice Scholar Lecture

2016-03-18 No Comments

Lab Director, Noshir Contractor delivered a talk entitled “Leveraging Computational Social Science to address Grand Societal Challenges” as an invited member of the Lambda Pi Eta Choice Scholar Lecture Series at the University of California Santa Barbara on March 4th, 2016.

Full Citation:
Contractor, N. (March 4, 2016). Leveraging Computational Social Science to address Grand Societal Challenges. Lambda Pi Eta Choice Scholar Lecture at the University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA.

Networks in the News

“How Do Our Social Networks Affect Our Health?”

2016-03-17 No Comments

This TED talk from Nicholas Christakis explores how social networks can be applied to understand many aspects of people’s lives. To illustrate this point, Christakis shows that close network ties with people who are obese increases someone obesity risk by 45%. The effect scales up to 3 degrees of separation. This means that people you may not even know or even interact with my have an impact your physical health – i.e. if a friend of a friend of a friend is obese, your risk of obesity is 10% higher than that expected by random chance. Christakis points the the underpinning phenomenon of homophily – birds of a feather flock together. For obese people, it could be that people of a similar body size tend to communicate or that people that have a common exposure to a certain health plugs communicate with one another. Further, if your friend adopts a behavior, the chances that you adopt that behavior too are much higher.

Listen to the full talk HERE.

Networks in the News

“Twitter can predict hurricane damage as well as emergency agencies”

2016-03-17 No Comments

John Bohannon of Science News reports on a recent study by Yury Kryvasheyeun, a research at Australia’s National Information and Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence in Melbourne.Kryvasheyeun’s team demonstrated that twitter data collected during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 can be a better predictor of damage that FEMA’s models for a fraction of the cost. Their predictions were robust even accounting for confounding factors the millennial bias of twitter users and the existence of twitter bots. This approach to data analytics could be a major step in the modernization of fast and effective disaster relief efforts. Kryvasheyeun hopes to scale up the potential of social media in this realm by incorporating a richer Facebook data set.

Read the full article HERE.

Networks in the News

“Super Bowl Weaving Twitter”

2016-03-11 No Comments

Check out this Superbowl 50 Twitter data interactive created by Luis Natera of cuidadpixel. Interestingly, Lady Gaga trends higher than either team that participated in the game. Natera highlights the differences between the people who tweet about artists vs about athletes as well as the powerful reach of advertisements for companies like Doritos and Esurance.

You can play around with the interactive HERE.

NOTE: The original article is written in Spanish. If you are not a Spanish speaker, we recommend using Chrome to view the article in order to take advantage of the translation feature.

SONIC News

Congratulations to the Winter 2016 Data Science Interns

2016-03-10 No Comments

Congratulations to the Winter 2016 Data Science Interns! Thanks for your hard work this quarter and for your thoughtful final presentations. We look forward to seeing many of you again next quarter and wish you all the very best in your future endeavors!

SONIC News

Data Science Intern Awarded Northwestern Undergraduate Research Grant

2016-03-07 No Comments

Data Science Intern, Rachel Li was awarded a grant by the Northwestern University Office of Undergraduate Research to help conduct research on behalf of SONIC Lab through the Network Sciences Collaborative Technology Alliance at the United States Military Academy this spring. Rachel is involved in data preparation and analyses for publications based on the MTS Experiment. This grant will build on her work in this project.

Academic Year URGs provide up to $1,000 to pay for your research expenses to do an independent academic or creative project in any field. You can read more bout the URG Program HERE.