Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Esteban Moro, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid "The lifetime of strong ties in social networks"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Title:
The lifetime of strong ties in social networks
Speaker:
Esteban Moro - Assistant Professor, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Talk Abstract:
While strong ties are of paramount important in processes like trust formation, cooperation, decision making, or community formation, little is known about what are the network and individual forces behind their formation and decay. In this talk I will present our recent research about how humans create and destroy ties dynamically and specifically, what is the typical lifetime of a strong tie in social networks. By analyzing the mobile phone communication network of about 20 million people over a long period of time of 19 months, we are able to see that humans have a constant capacity to maintain a number of social ties, which transalates into a constant creation and corresponding decay of ties. Thus, humans have very well defined dynamical social strategies (social keepers or social explorers) depending on how fast those relationships are created and destroyed. Furthermore we analyzed how strength of ties is built and destroyed in time. According to the famous "weak tie hypothesis" by Mark Granovetter, tie strength is correlated with its social embeddedness, but which one come first? Our research shows that once that a tie is created is reaches almost instantaneously its strength while its embeddedness slowly growths even months after tie formation, highlighting the fact that the Granovetter hypothesis is a dynamical process that happens at a very slow time scale in the network. We will also discuss the importance of our results for network interventions targeted at promoting behavior change or improving organizational performance.
Speaker Bio:
Esteban Moro is an associate professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain) and member of the Joint Institute UC3M-Santander on Big Data and academic director of the Master of Data Science and Big Data on Finance by AFI (Spain). Currently, he is a visiting professor at MIT Media Lab (US). he serves as a consultant for many public and private institutions and has held previously positions in University of Oxford, Institute of Knowledge Engineering (Spain), Instituto Mixto de Ciencias Matemáticas (Spain). Professor Moro earned his BSc in Physics from the University of Salamanca and a Ph.D in physics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He has published over 50 articles and has led and participated in over 20 projects funded by government agencies and/or private companies. His areas of interests are applied mathematics, financial mathematics, viral marketing and social network. He received the "Shared University Award" from IBM in 2007 for modeling the spread of information in social networks and application to viral marketing. And a Research Excellence Award in 2013 and 2015 by the Carlos III University of Madrid. His recent work has been covered by many media outlets, including articles and interviews in newspapers like El Pais, Muy Interesante, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal.
Live Stream:
Time
Wednesday, October 11, 2017 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Lightning Talks w/ Northwestern Scholars!
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speakers:
Yessica Herrera, Visiting Scholar, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: The Body Speaks: Visual Patterns of Psychological Stress
Aakriti Kumar, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: Evaluating Elements of Empathic Communication with Experts, Crowds, and Large Language Models
Tingyu "Mark" Zhao, PhD Student, Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
Talk Title: Noise Filtering in Complex Networks
Sign Up:
Sign up to present at a future Lightning Talk session. NICO Lightning Talks are open to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95387714084
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 14, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Rosemary Braun, Northwestern University "The Scale of Life"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
//
Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Rosemary Braun, Associate Professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University
Title:
The Scale of Life
Abstract:
Living systems exhibit surprising and beautiful self-organization at all scales. At the atomic level, proteins self-assemble into macromolecular complexes. The function of these machines is orchestrated within the cell by regulatory networks, whose activity is in turn dictated by, and coordinated with, the cells environment. This coordination takes place across large spans of space and time: the size and lifetime of organisms as large as the blue whale. Populations and ecosystems of many organisms in turn exhibit remarkable emergent dynamics. Today, advances in single-cell assays enable us to probe the molecular state of every cell in a sample in high-dimensional detail. But is this the correct scale at which to probe living systems? What can we learn from this data, and how can we abstract from the microscopic details to macroscopic phenotypes? In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent work bridging the cell and tissue/organism scales, and discuss some challenges and opportunities for the future.
Speaker Bio:
Rosemary Braun is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Applied Mathematics [ESAM], and Physics at Northwestern University. A theoretical physicist by training, she earned her PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois, followed by a Masters in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins University. She completed her postdoctoral training at the National Cancer Institute (NIH) before joining Northwestern as a faculty member. Today, she works at the intersection of statistics, mathematics, and biology to develop computational tools for analyzing high-dimensional data. In addition to her Northwestern affiliations, she is also Associate Director of the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, as well as external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/97015976754
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 21, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)