Advancing The Science of Networks in Communities
Ivan Hernandez is a collaborative post-doctoral researcher at Northwestern University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. in Psychology from the University of Florida, and his PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He is currently working on the Gates Project here at SONIC.
http://sonic.northwestern.edu/people/postdocs-graduate_students/ivan-hernandez/
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Dan Newman, who will present a talk on January 29th, 2015 at 2:00 P.M. in SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building, room 1.459. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with a Dr. Newman please schedule a time at http://bit.ly/SonicSpeaker. Please contact Nancy McLaughlin with any questions/comments.
In recent years, the spread of information over social networks has become a global phenomenon. Scientists have begun to study how information spreads from person to person, and how individuals’ motivations can cause a cascade effect in behavior. Researchers note that often “cascading behavior in a social network is guided by an entity that wants to achieve a certain outcome, for example… a political movement might be trying to guide the success of its message in a population.”
Further research will shed light on what guides the spread of information over social networks, and how individual behaviors play a role in information trends.
Read more here: http://zeenews.india.com/news/space/the-math-of-how-decisions-cascade-in-social-networks_1528658.html
The study of the network of networks, or interdependent networks, has become increasingly important. Interdependent networks are hugely prevalent especially in food, water, and fuel delivery systems. Scientists at Northeastern, Beihang, and Bar-Ilan Universities wrote in the National Science Review that the study of network of networks is “one of the most important directions in network science”.
Read more here: http://phys.org/news/2014-12-
What makes one a good group member? Is it intelligence? A recent study found that, “having a lot of intelligent people in the group did not necessarily mean that your group will have sure success.”
According to this study, what mattered more for group success was how individuals scored on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME) test. “The better the group members are in reading other people’s emotions through their eyes, the better the chances for the group’s success.”
Given some thought, the results of this study are not surprising. It certainly makes sense that a group member with the ability to be empathetic towards a fellow group member would be a better team-player than one who does not have that ability. Perhaps you might want to practice with this online RME Test before embarking on future collaborations?
Read more here: http://www.rappler.com/science-nature/ideas/science-solitaire/80143-science-group-success
This special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE focuses on how digital technology is changing the structure and dynamics of social networks and the tools we have for studying and designing them. Three main take-home messages:
• Social media, search, and data extraction technologies are not only changing the structure and dynamics of social networks, but are also changing how controllable these systems are.
• Precision, quantitatively justified interventions into behavioral dynamics are increasingly feasible within the digital domain, permitting large-scale experiments on human behavior and social systems. This is useful and presents challenges.
• We understand the relationship between energy and information – how bits get converted to watts – for electrical circuits, but not for social networks. In biology, computational social science, and the science of social engineering, the development of a functional theory of information is a central theoretical challenge that needs to be addressed if these disciplines are to have strong foundations.
Read more here: http://mae.engr.ucdavis.edu/dsouza/Pubs/PIEEE_vol102_12.pdf
PARADIGMS FOR CONTROL IN SOCIAL SYSTEMS
@ International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS) 2015
Jun 1-3 2015
Reykjavík, Iceland
http://networkdynamics.org/events/iccs2015_control/http://networkdynamics.org/events/iccs2015_control/
While the control of complex networks has recently emerged as an active area of research, the notion of control remains relatively undefined for social and economic systems. For example, what does it mean to control a co-purchase network, a web of trust, or an interbanking loan system? In this workshop, we invite researchers to explore what control means in such inherently social systems and how these notions of control can either be quantitatively modeled using existing techniques or necessitate the development of new modeling approaches.
We seek original submissions aimed at exploring challenges in the control of social systems, including:
* Case studies of control in social systems
* Formalizing objectives in social systems as control problems
* Models of dynamics and control in social systems
* Relationships between control mechanisms from different social systems
The organizers hope to engage a broad group of researchers to nucleate a discussion on understanding control in the context of social, economic, and business systems. Papers should be original, but can take the form of mini-survey papers or position papers on these topics. Travel support is available for some selected papers.
We aim to make this workshop hands on, with breakout sessions to delve into specific research questions and agendas.
Accepted papers will be included in the open-access Procedia Computer Science series.
Submission Instructions
Papers are limited to 10 pages with a deadline of January 22, 2015.
Submissions will be made through the ICCS 2015 EasyChair system.
The National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar award was bestowed upon SONIC Director, Noshir Contractor, at the 100th annual NCA conference held in Chicago, IL on November 20-23, 2014. This is a great honor not only for Professor Contractor, but also for the entirety of the SONIC research group. Congratulations Noshir!
The NCA Distinguished Scholar Award was created in 1991 to recognize and reward NCA members for a lifetime of scholarly achievement in the study of human communication. Recipients are selected to showcase the communication profession. The award is supported by the Mark L. Knapp Distinguished Scholar Fund. Since 1992, those recognized as NCA Distinguished Scholars nominate and elect members to join this select group.
Twitter announced last week that it will now make all tweets since the launch of the site in 2006 publically searchable to all users. Although the new search function is still in the works, this massive archive of tweets could mean more accessible datasets for social network researchers. From this day forward, Twitter’s search engine will index roughly half a trillion tweets.
Read more at the Twitter blog.
CFP_ParadigmsSocialControl-1.pdf