Speaker:

Jon Atwell, Data Science Scholar, Northwestern University

Title:

The Value of Niches for the Stabilization of Novelty: Combining Niche Construction and Hypercycles

Abstract:

Novel technologies, processes, and practices are often the recombination of existing components. Understanding the antecedents and drivers of recombination is already a thriving area of research, but in this talk I consider the staying power of a new recombination. The long term success of a recombination depends on actors' ability to stabilize a production network around it, a challenging problem of self-organization. This problem has a great deal in common with the emergence of macromolecules in prebiotic chemistry, but the canonical model of that process—the hypercycle—suffers from a hard complexity barrier at which self-organization ceases to be possible. I show, however, that if the hypercycle is structuring its own environment, this barrier recedes and production networks of much greater complexity are able to stabilize. This result draws on the mathematics of the evolutionary process of niche construction and highlights the potential importance of niches for understanding processes of self-organization in social settings. Results from a large-group behavioral experiment on the self-organization of a social convention support this view and will also be discussed.

Speaker Bio:

Jon Atwell is a sociologist who studies the social dimensions of cognition and the dynamic emergence of social order using computational and mathematical techniques. Jon received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2017, where he was an NSF IGERT fellow with the Center for the Study of Complex Systems. He is now a Data Science Scholar at Northwestern University with appointments with the Institute for Policy Research and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. He has B.A.s in Math, Economics and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin and worked in the restaurant industry before starting this career.

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data 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.

Live Stream:

bluejeans.com/8474912527

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APRIL MEETING: Monday, April 30, 2018 at 6:30pm in Chambers Hall, Evanston

DATA SCIENCE NIGHTS are monthly hack nights on popular data science topics, organized by fellows and scholars from the Northwestern Data Science Initiative. Each night will feature one hour of structured programming followed by a hacking night with data science project or learning groups of your choice.

Aspiring, beginning, and advanced data scientists are welcome!

For more info: data-science-nights.org

Agenda:
6:15 - 6:30: Socializing and Refreshments
6:30 - 6:40: Welcome and Announcements
6:40 - 7:05: Kat Albrecht of Amaral Lab and NICO:
“Fundamental Data Science to Investigate Social Problems”
7:05 - 7:15: Coordination of Breakout Groups
7:15: Breakout Groups, including:
- Getting started @ Data Science Nights
- Learning group on "Deep Learning"
- Project group on "City of Chicago salaries"
- Guided single-evening tutorial based on Kat's lecture
- Guided single-evening projects (e.g.: on bioinformatics or machine-learning)
- "Bring your own project" and more!

Supporting Groups:

This event is supported by the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems, the Northwestern Data Science Initiative, and the Northwestern University Postdoctoral Forum.

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Speaker:

Lynette Shaw - Assistant Professor, Department of Complex Systems and
Postdoctoral Scholar, Michigan Society of Fellows, University of Michigan

Title:

What's a Bitcoin Worth? Valuation and Categorization in the Rise of Digital Currency

Abstract:

TBA

Speaker Bio:

Lynette Shaw is a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Michigan Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor in Complex Systems. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Washington in 2016. Her research interests include cognition and culture, economic sociology, social theory, computational social science, complex systems, automated text analysis, and statistical methodologies.

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data 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.

Live Stream:

bluejeans.com/8474912527

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Background: Northwestern University has previously conducted highly successful Data Science Days and Computational Research Days on the Evanston campus. Based on feedback from attendees, there was strong interest in a similar event on the Chicago campus focused on biomedical research.

Vision: Our objective is to provide an opportunity for research collaboration and networking by bringing together faculty, staff, and students from Northwestern University, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and affiliated institutions with an interest in the application of data science and “big data” methods to clinical and biomedical domains. This event is designed to bring together domain experts and computational methodologists.

Stay tuned…more exciting details to come!

Speaker:

Sarah Bouchat, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University

Title:

TBA

Abstract:

TBA

Speaker Bio:

Sarah Bouchat is a College Fellow and Assistant Professor of political methodology at Northwestern University. She received her PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017. Her research interests are in political methodology, comparative political economy, and authoritarian politics with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. Her current work focuses on elicited priors, as well as machine learning and Bayesian statistical applications for the study of low information, authoritarian regimes like Myanmar.

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data 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.

Live Stream:

bluejeans.com/8474912527

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Speaker:

Alexandra Jilkine, Assistant Professor, Department of Applied & Computational Math & Statistics, University of Notre Dame

Title:

Models of Diffusion-Coupled Oscillators in Cell Biology

Abstract:

One of the major tasks that a cell faces during its lifecycle is how to spatially localize its components. Correct spatial organization of various proteins (cellular polarity) is fundamental not only for the correct cell shape, but also to carry out essential cellular functions, such as the spatial coordination of cell division.We present a mathematical model of the core mechanism responsible for the regulation of polarized growth dynamics in the model organism, fission yeast. The model is based on the competition of growth zones of polarity protein Cdc42 localized at the cell tips for a common substrate (inactive Cdc42) that diffuses in the cytosol. We consider several potential ways of implementing negative feedback between Cd42 and its GEF in this model that would be consistent with the observed oscillations of Cdc42 in fission yeast. We analyze the bifurcations in this model as the cell length increases, and total amount of Cdc42 and GEF increase. We find that a stable oscillation and a stable steady state can coexist, which is consistent with the experimental finding that only 50% of bipolar cells oscillate. Our model suggests that negative feedback is more likely to be acting through inhibition of GEF association rather than upregulation of GEF dissociation. We consider the differences between the deterministic and stochastic versions of the model, and discuss general conditions for how diffusion can trigger collective synchronous oscillations

Speaker Bio:

Alexandra Jilkine is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied & Computational Math & Statistics at the University of Notre Dame. She received a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the University of British Columbia in 2010. The focus of her research is on the formulation, analysis, and numerical simulation of mathematical models of spatial and temporal phenomena in Mathematical Cell Biology.

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data 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.

Live Stream:

bluejeans.com/8474912527

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MAY MEETING: Monday, May 21, 2018 at 6:30pm in Chambers Hall, Evanston

DATA SCIENCE NIGHTS are monthly hack nights on popular data science topics, organized by fellows and scholars from the Northwestern Data Science Initiative. Each night will feature one hour of structured programming followed by a hacking night with data science project or learning groups of your choice.

Aspiring, beginning, and advanced data scientists are welcome!

Agenda and Speakers for May: TBA.

For more info: data-science-nights.org

Supporting Groups:

This event is supported by the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems, the Northwestern Data Science Initiative, and the Northwestern University Postdoctoral Forum.

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From Sunday, June 17 to Friday, June 29, 2018, the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science is sponsoring a Chicago partner site hosted at Northwestern University. The purpose of the Summer Institute is to bring together graduate students and early career researchers in both social science (broadly conceived) and data science (broadly conceived). Content will include live-streamed lectures from the main site at Duke University as well as guest speakers who will present on cutting-edge computational research and methods. Topics covered include text analysis, digital data collection, experimental design, non-probability sampling, agent based modeling, and ethics.

Participation is restricted to graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and untenured faculty within 7 years of their Ph.D. Due to limited space, up to twenty participants will be invited. To facilitate the planning process, you must submit your application materials by April 21st, 2018.

Please visit the SICSS Chicago web site for more info.

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Redefine business in the 21st century at the intersection of computer science and social science

Save the date for this interdisciplinary event designed to connect a diverse community of researchers — academics, industry experts, open data activists, government agency workers and think tank analysts — who are dedicated to advancing social science through computational methods.

For four days, IC2S2 will be the epicenter of computational social science. Convening hundreds of attendees from more than 20 countries, the impact of IC2S2 is influential, innovative and global.

After successful events in Helsinki, Finland; Evanston, IL; and Cologne, Germany, the 4th Annual IC2S2 will return to Evanston and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Join us in 2018 to explore the future of social research and the biggest questions facing the field of computational social science today.

Conference web site: kell.gg/hostIC2S218

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