Events
Past Event
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Lightning Talks with Northwestern Post Doctoral Fellows and Scholars!
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speakers:
Joshua Becker - Post Doctoral Fellow, Kellogg and NICO
Yixue Wang - Ph.D. Student, Technology and Social Behavior
Frank van der Wouden - Post Doctoral Fellow, Kellogg and NICO
Igor Zakhlebin- Ph.D. student, Technology and Social Behavior
Abstracts and Bios:
Joshua Becker - Collected vs Collective Intelligence in the Wisdom of Crowds
Abstract: A common assumption in research on the wisdom of crowds is that in order to produce accurate decisions, groups must be composed of individuals who are socially and statistically independent. However, our research shows both computationally and experimentally that social influence can improve belief accuracy, as long as people are embedded in decentralized communication networks. These results hold in domains such as financial forecasting, physician diagnoses, and even political belief formation in echo chambers.
Bio: Joshua Becker is a postdoctoral fellow at NICO and the Kellogg School of Management specializing in collective intelligence. Their current research focuses on the “wisdom of crowds” and seeks to understand how social information processing impacts belief accuracy. Joshua’s mix of formal theoretical models and web-based experiments has been published in venues including Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Yixue Wang - The Role of Professional Feedback in Online News Comment Quality and Engagement
Abstract: News commenting is a prevalent form of online interaction, but it is fraught with issues, such as a low quality of discussion that often takes place. While various forms of moderation can be used to maintain quality, one technique that is underexplored is the role of professional feedback in normative signaling that helps set quality expectations for commenters. This talk will present an analysis of more than 13 million NYT comments and provide evidence that professional feedback in the form of NYT Picks is associated with an increase in quality and frequency of user commenting.
Bio: Yixue Wang is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Technology and Social Behavior program at Northwestern, focusing on computational journalism and social science. She analyzes human behavioral data as a means to enhance diversity, maintain civility and eliminate biases. She is a member of the Computational Journalism Lab at Northwestern, a Data Science fellow at Northwestern Data Science Initiative, and was a data engineer at a political analytics startup before her Ph.D.
Frank van der Wouden - The Adjacent Possible: Why some technological combinations are driving innovation
Abstract: Why are some technological combinations driving innovation? From all possible technological combinations, only very few occur. We use 7.8 million US patents to build networks of technological co-occurrence. We find that technologies sharing a common neighbor are most likely to be introduced in subsequent years. This is because inventors with experience in the commonly shared technology recognizes its value.
Bio: Frank van der Wouden is a post-doctoral research at Kellogg School of Management and NICO. He is interested in networks of collaboration, technological evolution and the spatial distribution of economic activities.
Igor Zakhlebin - Diffusion of Scientific Articles across Online Media
Abstract: Based on millions of social media posts, news articles, blog entries and other web pages, we quantify the cross-medium dynamics and structure of diffusion for scientific articles. We find that initial bursts of posting activity tend to co-occur in time across media, which helps us determine the speed at which individual media pick up scientific information. We use a network inference algorithm to study the underlying structure of diffusion and analyze the structure of the resulting network.
Bio: Igor is a PhD student in Technology and Social Behavior, a joint degree in Computer Science and Communication. He works with mentions of scientific research on social media to understand how information cascades originating in different media interact with each other as well as the role of individual users in dissemination of such information.
Live Stream:
Time
Wednesday, March 6, 2019 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO WEBINAR: Balazs Vedres, University of Oxford "Trust, creativity and AI: Bots on Wikipedia"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
Details
Speaker:
Balazs Vedres, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Title:
Trust, creativity and AI: Bots on Wikipedia
Abstract:
As human-AI hybrid collaboration networks become increasingly common, a key question is what impact such hybrid networks would have on human-to-human ties. In contrast to prior cases in the history of the social impact of technology, the inclusion of artificial agents with autonomous capabilities in human collaboration can have a fundamental impact on trust, reciprocity, cohesion, and relational complexity. In this paper we investigate the potential impact of the introduction of a bot on Wikipedia on the dynamics of weighted collaboration ties among humans. We collect data on the collaborative histories of editors around the moment they launch a bot, and normalise collaboration data by a matched sample of editors. We found that collaborations significantly weaken as a bot is introduced, and that disruption to human collaboration seems to be proportional to the level of activity of the bot.
Speaker Bio:
Balazs Vedres is associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, where he directs the new DPhil program on Social Data Science. Vedres' research furthers the agenda of developing social data science and network science with social theoretical insight. Vedres' recent research follows entrepreneurs, video game developers, jazz musicians, programmers, and graphic designers as they weave collaborative networks through their projects and recording sessions, analyzing questions of the sources of creativity, gender inequality, and the historical sustainability of innovation systems. His research results were published in the top journals of data science, network science, and sociology.
Webinar:
Zoom link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98578032472
Passcode: nico
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. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 12, 2021 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO WEBINAR: Lillian Lee, Cornell University "Discussion dynamics: controversy and content moderation"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
Details
Speaker:
Lillian Lee, Charles Roy Davis Professor, Department of Computer Science and Department of Information Science, Cornell University
Title:
Online Discussion Dynamics: Early prediction of controversy; content removal as a moderation strategy
Abstract:
TBA
Speaker Bio:
Lillian Lee, Charles Roy Davies professor, is a member of the department of computer science and of information science at Cornell University. Her research interests include natural language processing and computational social science. She is a AAAI Fellow, an ACL Fellow, and an ACM Fellow, and a former Sloan Fellow. She received one of three inaugural awards for the Test of Time (2002-2012) Paper on Computational Linguistics (joint with Bo Pang), and best paper awards at NAACL 2004 (joint with Regina Barzilay) and the IJCAI 2016 Natural Language Processing meets Journalism workshop (joint with Liye Fu and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil). She earned a citation in "Top Picks: Technology Research Advances of 2004" by Technology Research News (also joint with Regina Barzilay). Her co-authored work has received several mentions in the popular press, including The New York Times, NPR's All Things Considered, and NBC's The Today Show.
Webinar:
Zoom link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/99055485716
Passcode: nico
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. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 19, 2021 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO WEBINAR: Neave O'Clery, University College London "The Dynamics of Formal Employment Creation in Developing Cities"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
Details
Speaker:
Neave O'Clery, Associate Professor, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College London
Title:
The Dynamics of Formal Employment Creation in Developing Cities
Abstract:
TBA
Speaker Bio:
Neave O'Clery is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London where she leads a research group focused on data-driven models for economic development and the emergence of complexity for urban systems.
Professor O'Clery was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford. Before this she was a Fulbright Scholar and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School following her PhD (mathematics) at Imperial College. She is also founder and Editor in Chief of Angle – a journal based at Imperial College focusing on the intersection of policy, politics and science – since 2009.
Webinar:
Zoom link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/94532487312
Passcode: nico
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. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 26, 2021 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
Spring classes end
University Academic Calendar
All Day
Details
Spring classes end
Time
Saturday, June 5, 2021
Contact
Calendar
University Academic Calendar
Commencement (Tentative)
University Academic Calendar
All Day
Details
Commencement (Tentative)
Time
Monday, June 14, 2021
Contact
Calendar
University Academic Calendar