SONIC at OCMC 2020

Although this year’s OCMC 2020 have a different feel (i.e. virtual conference), we are delighted to announce that four of our graduate students (Diego Gomez-Zara, Jasmine Wu, Kyosuke Tanaka, and Niloufar Izadinia) were presenting there!

Diego Gomez-Zara kicks off our SONIC speakers on Friday (09/25) at OCMC 2020 with his poster presentation titled “Do I know you? The effects of social capital on self-assembled teams.”

On Saturday (09/26), Jasmine presented her work on “Status and network mobilization in organizations during the times of COVID-19,” while Niloufar presented her work on “New metrics for evaluating individual and team performance in multi-team systems” during poster session.

On Sunday (09/27), our 6th year graduate student Kyosuke Tanaka also presented his talk on “Positional and Dispositional Factors That Predict Who Commits Social Network Routing Errors and Who Learns from Them” during the Organizing Online and Offline Session. 

Kyosuke presented his research “Positional and Dispositional Factors That Predict Who Commits Social Network Routing Errors and Who Learns from Them”

Find out more about the conference here.

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Calls of NetSci2012 in Evanston, IL

Call for Contributed Talks & Poster Abstracts

Bringing together leading researchers, practitioners, and teachers in network science (including analysts, modeling experts, visualization specialists, and others), NetSci fosters interdisciplinary communication and collaboration. The conference focuses on novel directions in networks research within the biological and environmental sciences, computer and information sciences, social sciences, finance and business.

Deadlines
February 29, 2012: Submission of Abstracts
April 15, 2012: Notification of Acceptance
June 1, 2012: Last Day for Submission of Revisions

Rules Governing Submission of Contributed Talks & Posters

1. A first author may present only one contributed abstract for the regular program. If a second abstract is submitted with the same first author, that abstract may be placed as a poster, at the discretion of the program committee.

2. Abstracts submitted after the abstract deadline may be placed in poster sessions or rejected at the discretion of the program organizers, who are under no obligation to schedule any contributed abstract that arrives after the close of business on the deadline date.

3. Preferences expressed by the author for oral or poster presentation, for presentation on a particular day, or for a particular order of presentation within a session, will be accommodated whenever possible, but at the discretion of the program organizers. Please note your preference at the end of your abstract: Contributed Only, Poster Only or Both.

4. Abstracts must be submitted via the EasyChair abstract submission link.  Although .pdf submissions are accepted, you still MUST add the author’s and abstract in the spaces provided.  For .pdf’s, font must be no less than 10pt, have 1 inch margins, single space formatting and cannot exceed 1 page.

Submission Link: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=netsci2012

5. Once the abstracts have been sorted by the program organizers, honoring requests for changes to abstracts will be limited to misspellings in authors’ names up until the program is published on the web. Therefore it is imperative that you proof your abstract prior to submission.

6. Upon notification of abstract placement in the program it is the responsibility of the authors to check the abstract on the web program immediately and notify the NetSci staff of any discrepancies.

7. Requests for withdrawals must come to the NetSci in writing by e-mail. Withdrawals received prior to the printing of the program Bulletin will be withdrawn from the Bulletin. Withdrawals received after the printing of the Bulletin, will be reflected in the program Corrigenda.

8. In general, the time allotted for the presentation of oral contributed abstracts is seventeen minutes for presentation and three minutes for questions.

9. Authors of abstracts assigned to poster sessions should be sure that the title and content of the poster correspond to the title and content of the abstract printed in the program Bulletin. The poster should be displayed so that a number of people can view the presentation at the same time. You may tack your poster up to the provided backing boards. When designing your poster, take into consideration that attendees may be viewing the material from a distance beyond 3′. The minimum poster size is 3′ high x 3.5′ wide (.92 x 1.07 meters) but no larger than 4′ high x 4′ wide (1.22 x 1.22 meters).

All questions regarding NetSci 2012 Contributed Talks/Posters should be directed to netsci2012@gmail.comPlease place in the subject heading – “Calls”.


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Noshir Contractor Presents Keynote at Rutgers University Conference

Professor Noshir Contractor will present a keynote lecture entitled “Social and Knowledge Network-Building to Advance Global Health Decision-Making”  at Rutgers University’s “Advancing Global Health Decision-Making” conference. The conference will be held May 20-21, 2011 and marks the launch of a new initiative on health decision- making by EABIS, Rutgers Universiy, and Johnson & Johnson.

The conference website can be found at: http://www.eabis.org/projects/project-detail-view.html?uid=20.

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ICA Doctoral Consortium Acceptance

Brooke Foucault Welles has been invited to participate in the Doctoral Consortium of the Communication and Technology (CAT) at the International Communication Association (ICA) conference in Boston, MA on May 26, 2011. Brooke will be presenting her dissertation research on friendship networks in Second Life for feedback from a panel of esteemed faculty from across the field of communication (including SONIC’s own Noshir Contractor).

Dissertation Project Overview:

Friendships are among the most important relationships in an individual’s life. Throughout adolescence and into adulthood, friends take on ever-increasing importance, becoming the locus of significant social, emotional, and functional support.  As online social media grow in popularity, the Internet is becoming increasingly involved in the formation and maintenance of friendships. Although research shows that individuals more frequently use the Internet to communicate with friends that they first met in the offline world, making new friends online is not uncommon. In a recent survey of adult Internet users in the US, 16% of respondents reported having made at least one friend online, amounting to approximately 25 million new Internet-based friendships in the US alone (Katz & Rice, 2009). Adolescents report having online friendships at similar rates, with approximately 14% of teens reporting having close friends that they know exclusively through online interactions (Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2003).

Despite a considerable amount of attention paid to online friendship in the Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) literature, prior studies have largely focused on friendship at the individual or dyad level, using surveys or in-depth interviews to discover how individual dispositions or preferences lead to the emergence of friendships online (i.e. Livingstone & Bober, 2004; Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2002 ; Wolak, et al., 2003). While such studies provide important foundational insight into the nature of online relationships, they only tell part of the story. Based on research conducted in the offline world, we know that friendship selection is not driven exclusively by individual preferences. Instead, individual preferences, dyadic pressures, and structural forces all work concurrently to shape and constrain how friendships emerge and develop over time (Cairns & Cairns, 1994).

The purpose of my dissertation research is to extend the existing body of literature by taking network analytic approach to understanding online friendship. I will apply Monge and Contractor’s (2003) multi-theoretical multilevel modeling approach to study the emergence of friendship ties between previously unacquainted users of the virtual world Second Life. In doing so, I will be able to compare the relative effects of individual, dyadic and structural-level forces on the processes of friendship selection online. Further, recognizing recent discussions about the inconsistencies between the way individuals understand online and offline friendship (Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007), and because the limitations of quantitative network analysis do not allow for a deep understanding of why certain structural patterns emerge, I will supplement my quantitative studies with qualitative research conducted within Second Life with users of that virtual world. Together, these two approaches will offer a more complete picture of how and why online friendships form, and will lay the foundation for future discussions of the utility, stability and quality of these relationships.

 

 

 

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