Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Christopher Bail, Duke University "Cultural Bridges: Combining Social Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Explain how Social Media Posts go Viral"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Title:
Cultural Bridges: Combining Social Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Explain how Social Media Posts go Viral
Speaker:
Christopher Bail, Douglas and Ellen Lowey Associate Professor, Duke University
Talk Abstract:
Social media sites are rapidly becoming one of the most important forums for public deliberation about advocacy issues. However, social scientists have not explained why some advocacy organizations produce social media messages that inspire far-ranging conversation among social media users, whereas the vast majority of them receive little or no attention. I argue that advocacy organizations are more likely to inspire comments from new social media audiences if they create “cultural bridges,” or produce messages that combine conversational themes within an advocacy field that are seldom discussed together. I use natural language processing, network analysis, and a social media application to analyze how cultural bridges shaped public discourse about autism spectrum disorders on Facebook over the course of 1.5 years, controlling for various characteristics of advocacy organizations, their social media audiences, and the broader social context in which they interact. I show that organizations that create substantial cultural bridges provoke 2.52 times more comments about their messages from new social media users than those that do not, controlling for these factors. This study thus offers a theory of cultural messaging and public deliberation and computational techniques for text analysis and application-based survey research.
Speaker Bio:
Chris Bail is the Douglas and Ellen Lowey Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University. He is an internationally recognized leader in the study of political extremism as well as the emerging field of computational social science. Bail’s work tracks the growth of political extremism by developing new quantitative techniques to analyze the rapidly increasing amount of textual data available from social media sites and other digital sources as well as field experiments. His research has been published by Princeton University Press, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Public Health, American Sociological Review, and other leading journals. In 2017, he was one of thirty scholars worldwide honored by an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Security Agency, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, Google, and Amazon, among others. Bail regularly presents his work to policy makers and public audiences. He was recently invited to present the findings of his book, Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream to the 2016 Democratic National Convention as well as the annual meeting of the Islamic Society of North America—the largest Muslim organization in the United States. His research has also been featured in major media outlets such as NBC News, National Public Radio, and the Washington Post. Prior to joining Duke University Bail was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2011.
Further Reading:
Bail, Christopher A. 2016. "Combining Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing to Examine how Advocacy Organizations Stimulate Conversation on Social Media." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113:42 11823-11828
Live Stream:
Time
Wednesday, November 15, 2017 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
Fall classes begin 8 a.m.
University Academic Calendar
All Day
Details
Fall classes begin 8 a.m.
Time
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
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University Academic Calendar
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Michael Macy, Cornell University "The Unpredictability of Partisan Alignments"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Michael W. Macy - Goldwin Smith Professor of Arts and Sciences, and Director, Social Dynamics Laboratory, Cornell University.
Title:
Which Side Are You On: The Unpredictability of Partisan Alignments
Abstract:
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Speaker Bio:
Michael Macy (B.A., Ph.D Harvard; M.A. Stanford) is Goldwin Smith Professor of Arts and Sciences at Cornell and Director of the Social Dynamics Lab, with a dual appointment in the Departments of Sociology and Information Science. With support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Minerva Initiative, DARPA, and the National Research Foundation of Korea, his research team has used computational models, online laboratory experiments, and digital traces of device-mediated interaction to explore familiar but enigmatic social patterns, such as circadian rhythms, network topology and economic opportunity, lifestyle politics, the willingness to “pay it forward,” the mesh of civilizations, the spread of complex contagions, the polarization of opinion, segregation of neighborhoods, the emergence and collapse of fads, the spread of self-destructive behaviors, and the critical mass in collective action. His research has been published in leading journals, including Science, PNAS, Science Advances, Nature Human Behaviour, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Annual Review of Sociology.
Live Stream:
Time
Wednesday, September 25, 2019 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
Data Science Nights - FALL 2019 KICKOFF Meeting
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
6:30 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
FALL KICKOFF MEETING: Wednesday, September 25, 2019 at 6:30pm in Chambers Hall, Evanston
DATA SCIENCE NIGHTS are monthly hack nights on popular data science topics, organized by Northwestern University graduate students and scholars. Aspiring, beginning, and advanced data scientists are welcome!
LECTURE: "Open standards for machine learning model deployment" with IBM Developer Advocate Svetlana Levitan.
This year, for the fall kickoff of Data Science Nights we are excited to host a representative of IBM Cognitive Applications for Chicago, Svetlana Levitan. Svetlana is a Developer Advocate of IBM with many years of experience with IBM statistical Software SPSS, and Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML). She is the Chicagoland Technical Experts Community Chairperson, a Meetup organizer for Big Data Developers, Open Source Analytics, and Chicago Cloud Developers, and is also part of the Center for Open-Source Data and AI Technologies (CODAIT). This is an excellent opportunity to connect with IBM representatives!
AGENDA:
6:15pm - Refreshments
6:30pm - Presentation by Svetlana Levitan, IBM Developer Advocate, IBM Cognitive Applications.
7pm - Discussion about topics and working groups for future hacking night sessions
For more info: data-science-nights.org
Supporting Groups:
This event is supported by the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems and the Northwestern Data Science Initiative, in collaboration with ACiDS.
Time
Wednesday, September 25, 2019 at 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Joshua Becker, Northwestern "Network Structures of Collective Intelligence"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Joshua Becker - Postdoctoral Fellow, Kellogg School of Management and NICO
Title:
Network Structures of Collective Intelligence: The Contingent Benefits of Group Discussion
Abstract:
Research on the “wisdom of crowds” has found that the average belief in a group can be remarkably accurate even when individual group members are wildly inaccurate. This phenomenon has been observed for domains ranging from financial forecasting to medical diagnoses, and a common theoretical claim is that group beliefs are most accurate when they are collected from individuals who are socially and statistically independent. However, the requirement for independence poses a challenge in many social and organizational settings where interaction and communication are an intrinsic part of decision-making. In contrast, I show that social information processing can produce beliefs that are even more accurate than the collected beliefs of independent individuals—under the right conditions. This talk will present formal models and behavioral laboratory experiments to identify when, and why, group interaction can help (or hurt) numeric belief accuracy. The main focus of this talk compares mediated information exchange (i.e., the “Delphi method”) with unstructured discussion, showing how network theory can resolve longstanding contradictions in previous research. All discussed data is available on GitHub and my website.
Working Paper: https://bit.ly/2lZ6zHF
Speaker Bio:
Joshua Becker is a postdoctoral fellow at Kellogg School of Management and a researcher-in-residence at NICO. Joshua completed his PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on the network dynamics of collective intelligence. Their research has been published in venues including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Harvard Business Review. Prior to grad school Joshua worked professionally in conflict mediation (now serving pro bono) an experience that inspires their research on communication and decision-making.
Live Stream:
Time
Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: TBA "Title TBA"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
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Wednesday, October 9, 2019 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
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Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: TBA "Title TBA"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
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Wednesday, October 16, 2019 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
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Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: TBA "Title TBA"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
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Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: TBA "Title TBA"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
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Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
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Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: TBA "Title TBA"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
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Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: TBA "Title TBA"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
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Live Stream:
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Wednesday, November 20, 2019 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)