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IC2S2 event attendees are granted the option to select to participate in one of our Pre-Sessions, participating in either the Datathon on June 22-23, or the Skills Workshops on June 24.

IC2S2 2016 is the combination of two inaugural computational science conferences, the Computational Social Science Summit (last held May 15-17, 2015 in Evanston, Ill.) and the International Conference on Computational Social Science (last held June 8-11, 2015 in Helsinki, Finland).

Find additional information about the event by clicking here. 

Under the help of Yun Huang‘s feedback, she was granted second place for her “Development of Social Relationships in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games” poster expo.

Once again, congratulations Anne! The SONIC lab members are very proud of you!

You can read the publication here.

Full citation:

Ghasemian, F., Zamanifar, K., Ghasem-Aqaee, N., & Contractor, N. (2016). Toward a better scientific collaboration success prediction model through the feature space expansion. Scientometrics, (1-25). doi: 10.1007/s11192-016-1999-x

For more information on the grant that funded this project check out the following grant page.

Reference:

Wang, M., Huang, Y., Contractor, N., Fu. Y., and Chen, W., “A Network Approach for Understanding and Analyzing Product Co-consideration Relations in engineering Design”, 14^th International Design Conference, May 16-19 2016, Cavtat, Dubrovnick, Croatia.

Description:
The Network Leadership Training Academy (NLTA) is a place where network leaders gather to learn, share ideas, and develop skills for engaging in the “network way of working.” This 3-day workshop, hosted by the University of Colorado Denver’s Center on Collaborative Governance, is focused on building, managing, and evaluating effective networks. Many people today are deeply involved in the network way of working, but are struggling to find tools and a place to build skills and a community for this new way of connecting across boundaries. This interactive workshop is based on the premise that everyone involved in a network requires network leadership skills in order to be an active, effective member of a collaborative network. he agenda for the 2016 NLTA is packed full of opportunities for attendees to share and learn from each other’s experiences and skills, as well as research and tools to translate back to practice. Our keynote address on Building and Leveraging Powerful Social Networks features Dr. Noshir Contractor, Professor at Northwestern University and Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) research center. He will share his work on investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in a wide variety of contexts. Large group sessions will be led by NLTA core trainers who are recognized for their contributions to network science research. Session topics include: · Managing Networks, Brint Milward, Ph.D, University of Arizona · Network Way of Working: Building a Network Culture, Janice Popp, MSW, RSW, University of Calgary · Affective Contagion in Networks: Evaluating Process Quality, Darrin Hicks, PhD, University of Denver · Evaluating Networks as Systems, Danielle Varda, PhD, University of Colorado Denver Other session topics include: Networks 101, Using PARTNER’s Social Network Analysis Tool to Evaluate your Networks, Networks as Policy Tools: “Network Nuggets” from Research and Practice, Facilitation Skills, Conflict Training, and Collective Impact.

For more information on this exciting new project, click here.

This is the second collaborative NASA grant among Prof. Contractor, Prof. DeChurch, and Prof. Bell; the first being CREWS: Crew Recommender for Effective Work in Space. This is also the fourth NASA grant the SONIC Lab has received in the past two years. Be sure to check out our work on the other two grants: SCALE and INERTIA!

Read the full article in Science Daily here.

Please contact Eric Forbush with any questions or comments.

Frames and Fields on Twitter

Associate Professor School of Sociology Centre for Social Research & Methods
ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences

Abstract

We characterize an online activist field as a social arena in which participants vie for the definition of the most urgent cause or risk issue. We ask the question: to what extent is it conceptually and empirical valid to regard protest activity on Twitter, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, as an online activist field? Network analysis is used to examine two core aspects of field theory: the behavior of incumbents vs new entrants in response to a new issue or frame, and the dynamics of field formation. This project extends earlier research concerning organizations involved in environmental social movements and online collective identity formation and contributes to emerging research on activism in the era of the “networked individual”.

Biography 

Robert Ackland is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Sociology and the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University. He has degrees in economics from the University of Melbourne, Yale University and the ANU, where he gained his PhD on index number theory in the context of cross-country comparisons of income and inequality in 2001, and he has worked as an economist at the Australian Department of Immigration and the World Bank. Since 2002 Robert has been conducting quantitative research into online social and organizational networks, and his research has appeared in journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Social Networks, Computational Economics, Social Science Computer Review, and the Journal of Social Structure. He leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks Lab and he created the VOSON software for hyperlink network construction and analysis, which has been publicly available since 2006 and is used by researchers worldwide. Robert established the Social Science of the Internet specialization in the ANU’s Master of Social Research in 2008, and his book Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (SAGE) was published in 2013. Robert has been chief investigator on five Australian Research Council grants and in 2007, he was a UK National Centre for e-Social Science Visiting Fellow and James Martin Visiting Fellow based at the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2011, he was appointed to the Science Council of the Web Foundation’s Web Index project and he recently contributed a background paper to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends.

More information can be found at Robert’s website: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/ackland-rj

Stream the full presentation here:

Associate Professor, Organizational Behavior, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western University

The New Foundations: Emergence, Constructionism and the New Reductionism

Abstract

The science of studying emergence is not well understood among organizational scholars.  Scholars often transfer assumptions from variance analysis to this particular application of process analysis.  Further, its components parts—emerging, emergent outcomes and their properties—are often confounded leading to muddled thinking.  In this paper, I distinguish among these components.  Specifically, I discuss the features of complex systems drawing out distinctions between complex vs complicated non-linear systems, constituting vs causing, aggregation, levels, and holism.  I draw out the implications of this research approach, emphasizing the paradigm shift required to apply it from other approaches, using examples from organization studies, particularly the Strategy Microfoundations debate.

Biography 

Corinne Coen is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Weatherhead School of Management in Case Western Reserve University where she holds the Lewis Progressive Fellowship and is the Chair of the Faculty Council. She has an MBA from University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Michigan. Her research interests focus on the dynamics of work teams as they generate cooperation and competition, cohesion, and sub-groups.  In the pursuit of understanding these dynamic processes, Corinne has special expertise in agent-based modeling and the study of cross-level emergence.  Her work has been published in Organizational Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory and Simulation Modeling Practice and Theory.

Stream the full presentation here: