Speaker:

Steve Cicala - Assistant Professor, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy

Title:

Imperfect Markets versus Imperfect Regulation in U.S. Electricity Generation

Abstract:

This paper evaluates changes in electricity generation costs caused by the introduction of market mechanisms to allocate production in the United States. I use the staggered transition to markets from 1999-2012 to estimate the causal impact of liberalization using a differences-in-differences design on a comprehensive hourly panel of electricity demand, generators' costs, capacities, and output. I find that markets reduce production costs by 5% by reallocating production: Gains from trade across service areas increase by 55% based on a 25% increase in traded electricity, and costs from using uneconomical units fall 16%.

Speaker Bio:

Steve Cicala is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His work focuses on the economics of regulation, particularly with respect to environmental and energy policy.

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Faculty Co-Chairs, Associate Professor of Molecular Biosciences Heather Pinkett and Dean Teresa Woodruff of the Graduate School, will be in conversation with author of Hidden Figures Margot Lee Shetterly. There will be a book signing after the talk.

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY is a writer, researcher, entrepreneur and author of Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, which was a top book of 2016 for both TIME and Publisher’s Weekly, a USA Today bestseller, and a #1 New York Times bestseller.

Shetterly is also the founder of the Human Computer Project, a digital archive telling the stories all of NASA’s “Human Computers,” women from all backgrounds whose work tipped the balance in favor of the United States in WWII, the Cold War, and the Space Race. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities support her research. She is currently a scholar-in-residence at the University of Virginia, with joint appointments at the McIntire School of Commerce and the School of Engineering.

Speaker:

Suzan van der Lee - Professor, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University

Title:

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Abstract:

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Speaker Bio:

Suzan van der Lee is a seismologist and a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Northwestern University. She has a Ph.D. in Geological and Geophysical Sciences from Princeton University and an M.Sc. in Geophysics from the University of Utrecht.

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Title: The Science of Sharing and the Sharing of Science: Diffusion of Scientific Articles across Online Platforms

Abstract

Online platforms such as social media sites, electronic news outlets, blogs, and wikis are now used by most scholars for sharing their findings. They have also become the primary source of information about scientific advances for the wider public. As the online dissemination of scientific findings increasingly influences personal decision-making and government action, there is a growing necessity and interest in studying how people share research findings online. In this talk, I report results on analyses of the diffusion of scientific articles across major online platforms based on 63 million mentions of about 7.2 million articles over a 7-year period. First, I show commonalities between people sharing science and other content such as news articles and memes. Second, I explore specifics of sharing science. We reconstruct the likely underlying structure of information diffusion and investigate the transfer of information about scientific articles within and across different platforms. In particular, we (1) study the role of different users in the dissemination of information to better understand who are the prime sharers of knowledge, (2) explore the propagation of articles between platforms, and (3) analyze the structural virality of individual information cascades to place science sharing on the spectrum between pure broadcasting and actual peer-to-peer diffusion. This work provides the broadest study to date about the sharing of science online and builds the basis for an informed model of the dynamics of research coverage across platforms.

Bio

Ágnes Horvát (PhD, Heidelberg University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, an affiliated faculty of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), the Northwestern University Transportation Center (NUTC), and the Department of Management and Organizations of the Kellogg School of Management (by courtesy). Her current research develops data science approaches to promote cultural innovation processes that integrate individual creativity, collaboration networks, crowdsourcing and machine learning tools. With training in Physics (BSc, MSc, and PhD) and Film and Media (BA), her work uses a multidisciplinary empirical approach to measure and understand success dynamics in cultural and knowledge markets, as well as to identify expressions of the wisdom of crowds that facilitate innovation and ensure better decision-making. Her research group's work is funded by the National Science Foundation through a CRII award. Before starting her appointment in the School of Communication, Horvát was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO).

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Speaker:

Keara Lane - Assistant Professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University

Title:

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Abstract:

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Speaker Bio:

Keara Lane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences and the Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences Graduate Program, Northwestern University. The Lane lab is focused on developing tools and approaches to explore the time dimension, or dynamics, of bacterial infection in individual cells.

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Speaker:

Lori Ziegelmeier - Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, Macalester College

Title:

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Speaker Bio:

Lori Ziegelmeier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at Macalester College. Her research is broadly interested in geometric and topological data analysis, an area of mathematics at the intersection of many mathematical fields: geometry, topology, linear algebra, optimization, computing, and machine learning. She is particularly interested in developing and applying tools from computational geometry and topology to a wide variety of data sets from hyperspectral imagery to biological aggregations.

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Speaker:

Hamed Alhoori, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Northern Illinois University

Title:

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Abstract:

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Speaker Bio:

Hamed Alhoori is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and the Director of DATA lab at Northern Illinois University. The Data Lab focuses on Data Science, Text Analytics, Social Media Mining, Science of Science, Computational Social Science, and Human-Centered Computing.

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Speaker:

NICO is hosting a lightning talk seminar each term as a part of our Wednesdays@NICO seminar series. Northwestern graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are invited to participate. To sign up, please visit: https://bit.ly/2lRqSXK

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Speaker Bios:

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Winter Break Begins

Winter Classes begin 8 a.m.