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 rest
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.… Read the rest
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.… Read the rest
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.… Read the rest
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.… Read the rest
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.… Read the rest
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!… Read the rest
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.… Read the rest
Rafi Letzter of Tech Insider reports that Facebook Messenger has a feature capable of sending information about when other users are online to your computer in plain text. Soren Louv-Jansen used this to write a program that checked Facebook every ten minutes and recorded these timestamps.… Read the rest
Lab Director, Noshir Contractor, co-organized the Designing Online Experiments: Citizen Science Approaches to Research Workshop at the 19th Annual Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Conference in San Francisco on February 27th, 2016
Full Citation:
Co-organizer, Designing Online Experiments: Citizen Science Approaches to Research Workshop at the 19th Annual Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) Conference, February 27, 2016, San Francisco, CA.… Read the rest