NICO LIGHTNING TALKS are open to Northwestern graduate student or postdoctoral fellows! If you are interested in giving a lightning talk (~10 minutes with questions) to the broader NICO audience, please fill out this short survey: https://forms.gle/vB4zc6cWoD2GihWB8. We will host our next session in Fall 2022.

Spring Speakers:

Lluc Font - Visiting PhD Student
McCormick School of Engineering
“Information-theoretic analysis of judicial decisions to reveal socially disruptive periods and topics”

Laws and legal decision-making regulate how societies function. Therefore, they evolve and adapt to new social paradigms and reflect changes in culture and social norms, and are a good proxy for the evolution of socially sensitive issues. Here, we propose an information-theoretic methodology to quantitatively track global trends and shifts in the evolution of large corpora of judicial decisions, and thus to detect periods in which disruptive topics arise.

Binglu Wang - PhD Student
Kellogg School of Management
Quantifying the dynamics of innovation abandonment across scientific, technological, commercial, and pharmacological domains”

Understanding the dynamics of innovation abandonment is essential for a deeper understanding of the innovation lifecyle. Here, we analyze four large-scale datasets that capture the dynamics of the innovation lifecycle from adoption to abandonment in diverse contexts: 2.6M scientists, 0.5M inventors, 3.5M consumers, and 5313 pharmaceutical organizations. We find that at a macro level, the abandoning probability of individuals or organizations increases with time, influencing the overall popularity dynamics. Yet beneath this macro trend lies a simple effect of preferential abandonment, governed by the underlying network in which abandonment unfolds. We find that this simple effect creates complex dynamics in how the underlying ecosystem disintegrates, generating a novel structural collapse in networked systems perceived as robust against random abandonments. Together these results demonstrate that the dynamics of innovation abandonment follow simple and reproducible patterns with direct implications for the structural properties of the underlying system. These results not only deepen our quantitative understanding of networked social systems, but also have implications for retaining user communities and protecting the integrity of ecosystems, suggesting that preferential abandonment may be a generic property within the innovation lifecycle.

Jorin Graham - PhD Student
Department of Physics
“Correlated dynamics enhanced by uncorrelated noise in coupled systems”

Synchronization arises in a wide variety of contexts, including physical systems – such as arrays of Josephson junctions, laser arrays, and power grids – and biological systems – such as ecosystems, circadian clocks, and cardiac pacemakers. These systems are embedded in environments whose influence can promote or disrupt synchronization. For example, correlated environmental noise often enhances synchronization, as it allows the system to inherit order from the environment. Recently, it has been shown that for coupled nonlinear oscillators, uncorrelated noise can in fact enhance synchronization better than correlated noise (Nicolaou et al., PRL 2020). In this presentation, I will show that a similar phenomenon arises even in the simplest coupled systems: systems that are linear and linearly coupled.

Moh Hosseinioun- Research Fellow
Kellogg School of Management
“Unpacking human capital using occupational skills”

How do we become more valuable workers? We invest in education and training to acquire skills, knowledge, and abilities that make us better at what we do. However, the acquisition of skills is not a series of independent events but is rather cumulative and interdependent among previous attainments. Certain skills are foundations for others— such as arithmetic for calculus— while there are skills like bodily coordination and orientation that can be mastered relatively independently. We ask whether such interdependencies determine the value of skills by analyzing skills' usage distributions across occupations.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/92960926949
Passcode: NICO2022

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.

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