Complexity and Social Networks Blog

Today I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal in an article on scientific collaborations by Robert Lee Hotz. (They also did a short video accompanying the online edition, in which I talk a little bit more about the advantages and problems of collaboration.) Here's an excerpt of the piece:

Once a mostly solitary endeavor, science in the 21st century has become a team sport. Research collaborations are larger, more common, more widely cited and more influential than ever, management studies show. Measured by the number of authors on a published paper, research teams have grown steadily in size and number every year since World War II.

To gauge the rise of team science, management experts at Northwestern University recently analyzed 2.1 million U.S. patents filed since 1975 and all of the 19.9 million research papers archived in the Institute for Scientific Information database. "We looked at the recorded universe of all published papers across all fields, and we found that all fields were moving heavily toward teamwork," says Northwestern business sociologist Brian Uzzi.

As research projects grow more complicated, management becomes a variable in every experiment. "You can't do it alone," says research management analyst Maria Binz-Scharf at City College of New York. "The question is how you put it all together."

The key is bringing the people together in the first place, which has sped technological advancements that often benefited the rest of us. The ease of global business and social networking today owes much to the World Wide Web, which was designed to aid information-sharing between scientists. It was invented at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the home of the Large Hadron Collider.

New online science management experiments are underway. Last year, the National Science Foundation started a $50 million project to map all plant biology research, from the level of molecules to organisms to entire ecosystems, so scientists can swoop through shared data as if they were using Google Earth. Last month, U.S. computer experts launched a $12 million federal project to create a national biomedical network called VIVOweb to encourage collaborations.

Scientists are experimenting with the new technology of teamwork even in mathematics, where researchers customarily work alone.

This is such an exciting area of research. Together with Leslie Paik and Avrom Caplan (both from the City College of New York), I will be devoting a good part of the next three years to study how scientists collaborate, especially how the collaborative production of scientific knowledge changes as collaborations are increasingly virtual. This work is supported by the NSF (see here for the project abstract and here for the CCNY press release).

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A short schedule for CCCSN this term, with Michael Macy on November 23 and Carter Butts on December 10. The details on Macy:

Michael Macy (Cornell)

The Length of Weak Ties

November 23, 12-1:30pm
440 Huntington Ave. ~ 366 West Village H

Granovetter's theory of "the strength of weak ties" is one of the most-cited social theories in network science and an important precursor for Watts' and Strogatz' discovery of small world networks. The "strength" is that information about economic opportunities is more likely to come from socially distant acquaintances than close friends. Until recently, however, the structure and strength of social ties has been almost impossible to measure at the societal level. We test predictions of this theory by combining the most complete record of a national communication network studied to date with data on the socio-economic well-being of communities and the purchasing behavior of individuals. We show for the first time that the diversity of individuals' ties has a strong positive correlation with the social and economic rank of the community (R2=.78). Moreover, contrary to theoretical predictions, clustered relations were no stronger than ties that bridge between clusters and yet were more effective as conduits of peer influence. We speculate that ties within clusters are mainly friendship-oriented, while those between clusters are mainly task-oriented.

Three other talks of interest this coming week:

The College of Computer and Information Science presents a Colloquium by:

Madhav Marathe (Virginia Tech)
Computational Network and Social Science: Implications for Public Policy

Date: Wednesday, November 18
Time: 2:00pm
Place: 366 West Village H

Title:

Abstract:
Complex Networks are pervasive in our society. Realistic biological, information, social and technical networks share a number of unique features that distinguish them from physical networks. Examples of such features include: irregularity, time-varying structure, heterogeneity among individual components and selfish/cooperative
game-like behavior by individual components. Furthermore, the network structure, the dynamical process on the network and the behavior of constituent agents co-evolve over time. The size and heterogeneity of these networks, their co-evolving nature and the technical difficulties in applying dimension reduction techniques commonly used to analyze physical systems makes the task to understanding and reasoning about these networks even more challenging.

Recent quantitative changes in high performance and pervasive computing including faster machines, distributed sensors and service-oriented software have created new opportunities for collecting, integrating, analyzing and accessing information related to such large complex networks. The advances in network and information science that build on this new capability provide entirely new ways for reasoning and controlling these networks. Together, they enhance our ability to formulate, analyze and realize novel public policies pertaining to these complex networks.

Over the last 15 years, our group has established a theory based program for modeling, simulation and associated decision support tools for understanding large complex network. Complementing this is a program to develop a scalable service delivery framework, that provides policy analysts and scientists seamless access to the modeling
environment. After a brief overview, I will describe our approach within the context of a specific application: development of modeling and decision support environments to study epidemics in co-evolving social and wireless networks. Understanding these
epidemiological processes is of immense societal importance. Additionally they serve as excellent "model organisms" for developing a theory of co-evolving complex networks. Individual and collective behavioral adaptation is critical in these systems and will be highlighted via illustrative case studies.

Nov 18th, 3:30-5:00 pm
Harvard Jason Greenberg, MIT
Lifeblood or Liability?: Schumpeter, Stinchombe, and the Double-edged Sword of Strangers or Strong ties in the Startup Process
1550 William James Hall.

Who should you start a business with, individuals you trust such as family members or friends or strangers who are more likely able to provide access to distinct resources? In one of the most influential arguments in organizational sociology Arthur Stinchcombe argued that new as opposed to old organizations are more likely to die because of a "liability of newness." The general thesis has received empirical support. However, Stinchcombe identified four mechanisms that individually and collectively compose the liability. One of the liabilities he identified holds that new organizations are more likely to die because they must rely upon relations among strangers, and strangers are less likely to trust each other. Trust, in turn, is an essential ingredient in economic transactions that entail risk and uncertainty, which are central elements of any startup. This "liability of strangers" mechanism has not been evaluated empirically in startups. On the other hand, research suggests that strangers are particularly well suited to act as bridging ties that afford advantages in the startup process by offering access to diverse information about market opportunities and distinct resources. This social structural mechanism is consistent with Schumpeter's view of entrepreneurship as novel combination and Simmel's theorization of the social position of stranger. This paper assesses whether including strangers or strong ties (e.g., family, friends) on a founding team is net positive or negative in terms of predicting the fraction of business-relevant milestones achieved, dissolving the venture, or achieving viability. Results consistently show that starting a business with friends from outside work is associated with negative outcomes, whereas starting a business with friends from work is associated with positive outcomes. There also does not appear to be a liability of strangers. In point of fact, founding teams in knowledge or research intensive firms that include stranger dyads in the founding team are more likely to accomplish business-relevant milestones.

Nathan Eagle, (Santa Fe Institute & MIT)
Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Social Systems
Friday, November 20th at 2:30 PM
440 Huntington Ave. ~ 366 West Village H
Boston, MA 02115

Petabytes of data about human movements, transactions, and communication patterns are continuously being generated by everyday technologies such as mobile phones and credit cards. This unprecedented volume of information facilitates a novel set of research questions applicable to a wide range of development issues. In collaboration with the mobile phone, internet, and credit card industries, my colleagues and I are aggregating and analyzing behavioral data from over 250 million people from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. I will discuss a selection of projects arising from these collaborations that involve inferring behavioral dynamics on a broad spectrum of scales; from risky behavior in a group of MIT freshman to population-level behavioral signatures, including cholera outbreaks in Rwanda and wealth in the UK. Access to the movement patterns of the majority of mobile phones in East Africa also facilitates realistic models of disease transmission as well as slum formations. This vast volume of data requires new analytical tools - we are developing a range of large-scale network analysis and machine learning algorithms that we hope will provide deeper insight into human behavior. However, ultimately our goal is to determine how we can use these insights to actively improve the lives of the billions of people who generate this data and the societies in which they live.

Posted by David Lazer at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A while ago, I blogged about the complexity of government 2.0. I described the efforts by a group of people to create an open declaration on eGovernment in Europe in the coming years alongside the official declaration which will be presented during the 5th EU Ministerial conference in Malmoe, Sweden next week. To learn more about participation in the age of 2.0 I joined the group. It was neither easy to fit quality contribution time into ones schedule nor getting people to participate in the various stages of the creation of the declaration.

There are 6 days left to get another 800 [or more] supporters of the open declaration on European public services. If you like it, please endorse it by visiting this website and/or spreading the word through the channels available to you.

I will send updates directly from the conference in Malmoe next week.

Update: The official declaration's scope and structure might be as follows:

Common vision
"We, the ministers, agree to create an e-enabled European Union where citizens and businesses can easily access public services and public information all over the Union, enjoy true freedom of movement on the Single Market, and where administrations easily collaborate across boundaries in order to fulfill this goal."

Priority 1: E-government Empowering Citizens and Businesses
"We, the Ministers, agree to work pro-actively in order to make it easy for citizens and businesses to engage with government administrations at anytime and anywhere in the EU in order reap the benefits of the Union, have easy access to public information and feel secure that their integrity and information is protected when engaging with administrations over the Net."

Priority 2: E-government in Support of the Single Market
"We, the Ministers, agree to make it easier for European citizen to travel, study, work, retire and reside in all countries of the Union and make it easier for businesses to provide and procure services everywhere in the Union. Consequently appropriate legal and technical preconditions for cross-border e-services needs to be created and joint demand-driven e-government projects needs to be supported. Such projects should be centrally monitored in order to seek synergies and prevent overlap with other ongoing projects and to avoid the creation of new barriers in the internal market."

E-government Enabling Administrative Efficiency and Effectiveness
"We, the Ministers, agree to make it easier for public administrations in the EU to collaborate across boundaries by creating a European Common Area of e-Government. This new area of partnership and joint action between Member States should enable European public administrations to interact easily and connect intelligently with each other as well as with private actors in order to deliver personal and overall public value to society and facilitate the implementation of European Directives. Within this area experiences should also be shared on how to reduce the administrative burden, reduce the carbon footprint and facilitate organizational change."

The details would be described in an action plan.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am pleased to announce the release of the report, Online Townhall Meetings: Exploring Democracy in the 21st Century. As noted below, this report summarizes the results of a series of randomized experiments, involving 13 Members of Congress meeting with constituents in small groups online. What were the quality of these sessions? What impact did these sessions have on participants? The results were quite heartening. Some of the key findings of the report:

• The meetings increased engagement in politics. Participants in the sessions were more likely to vote and were dramatically more likely to follow the election and to attempt to persuade other citizens how to vote.

• The discussions in the town hall meetings were of high quality. By standards of deliberative quality (use of accurate facts to support arguments, respect for alternative points of view, etc.) the discussions were of a very high quality.

• The town hall meetings attracted a diverse array of people. These sessions were more likely than traditional venues to attract people from demographics not traditionally engaged in politics and people frustrated with the political system.

• The sessions were extremely popular with constituents. A remarkable 96% of participants said they would like to be included in similar events in the future.

• The online town hall meetings increased constituents' approval of the Member of Congress. Members experienced an average net approval rating jump of 18 points. There were similar increases in trust and perceptions of personal qualities such as hardworking and accessible. The sessions also increased constituents' approval of the Member's position on the issue discussed.

• The online sessions increased the probability of voting for the Member. The probability of voting for the Member was 49% for control subjects and 56% for people who participated in a session, with a particularly dramatic impact on swing voters.

• The positive results were seen in small and large sessions. Most of the sessions were conducted by Representatives with small groups of 15-25 constituents. To test the scalability, the team conducted one session with a Senator and nearly 200 people. All of the major results were replicated with this larger group.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

What is the potential of the Internet to facilitate a connection between Members of Congress and their constituents? To tackle this question, Mike Neblo, Kevin Esterling and I, in collaboration with a small, terrific nonprofit in Washington, the Congressional Management Foundation, conducted a series of online townhalls in the Summers of 2006 and 2008. Our question: what impact did these townhalls have on political engagement, policy knowledge, views of the Member, and so on? These were field experiments, with subjects randomly sorted into "treatment" (participate in session) and "control" conditions. We got some pretty striking results, although that is all I am going to say for now, because we are officially releasing the report on Monday. I will put it up at 11am on Monday, and if you are media and would like an embargoed copy, drop me an e-mail. Meanwhile, here's the cover:

Posted by David Lazer at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I knew I was in for a treat when I sat down to listen to Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger at NYU's Law School yesterday afternoon. Viktor discussed his new book, Delete - The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, and kicked off a book tour that will take him to several US locations (I've listed upcoming talks below). Although he had arrived from Singapore only hours prior to giving his talk, he engaged the audience with his clever presentation, leaving us wanting more even after 45 minutes of Q&A.

Mayer-Schoenberger beautifully illustrates our society's transition from "biological forgetting to digital remembering". While for generations our efforts have concentrated on trying to remember events, actions, etc. and preserve them for posterity, in today's world we are facing the opposite problem: The digital memory is here to stay. However, the book argues, forgetting has its virtues, and needs to be reintroduced. The solution is simple: Put an expiration date on information.

The book is a great read (as soon as I got it, my non-academic spouse snagged it and took it on a business trip, which usually doesn't happen with the books I order), and I am not even close to doing it justice with this description, so if you find yourselves near any of the locations of the book tour, make sure to stop by and join the discussion.

Future stops (from here):
• Harvard's Berkman Center on October 7 at 6 pm
• Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy on October 8 at 4.30 pm
• Town Hall Seattle on October 19 at 7.30 pm
• University of California Berkeley Law School on October 22 at 4 pm

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

For those of you in the Boston area, there will be a one day conference at MIT on Future Networks - Economy, Energy, Health. A lot of the local networks researchers are talking here, particularly those with more of a computer science bent.

Ben Shneidernman from the University of Maryland is giving the keynote, and friends of the blog Marta Gonzalez and Cesar Hidalgo will also be speaking (along with myself). Hope to see many of you there.

Posted by Ben Waber at 2:32 PM | Permalink

While I am making announcements, I will also mention the upcoming Workshop on Information in Networks, taking place Sept 25-26 in NYC. This workshop, put together by Sinan Aral at NYU, pulls together a multidisciplinary all star cast of scholars in this area. A brief description from the website:

WIN is a Social Networks Summit intended to foster collaboration and to build community. The increasing availability of massive networked data is revolutionizing the scientific study of a variety of phenomena in fields as diverse as Computer Science, Economics, Physics and Sociology. Yet, while many important advances have taken place in these different communities, the dialog between researchers across disciplines is only beginning. The purpose of WIN is to bring together leading researchers studying 'information in networks' - its distribution, its diffusion, its value, and its influence on social and economic outcomes - in order to lay the foundation for ongoing relationships and to build a lasting multidisciplinary research community.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:32 AM | Permalink

I am pleased to introduce a new blogger to our team: Jukka-Pekka Onnela. Jukka-Pekka has been a Fulbright-funded postdoc with me for the last year, and holds a PhD from the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, in Complex Systems. He was lead author on a paper in PNAS on which I was a coauthor, "Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks," and has done a wide array of thought provoking research on various (usually human) complex systems. It is a pleasure to welcome him to the netgov blog.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I wanted let everyone know about a workshop at this year's Academy of Management Conference that I'm organizing with Lynn Wu. I've posted the call for participation below. Hope to see you there!

Reality Mining Workshop at the 2009 Academy of Management Annual Meeting
Saturday, August 8, 8 - 10 AM

In the last decade sensors have become cheaper, faster, and more ubiquitous, enabling automatic collection of data at the millisecond-level time scale in a technique called Reality Mining. The Reality Mining workshop will focus on discussing what new management paradigms can be enabled with this technique, as well as how researchers can immediately use sensing tools to augment their research.

To give participants a better `feel' for the technology and its potential usefulness, we will arrange for participants to have the option of wearing Sociometric Badges: name badges with electronics that continuously measure face-to-face interaction parameters (e.g., who is talking, who is nearby).

Reality Mining research was described by the International Conference on Information Systems 2008 awards committee as "opening a new area of Management Information Systems research." This has generated a large volume of interest in Reality Mining techniques, which is only expected to build as the technology behind this methodology matures. Come and learn about this groundbreaking new research methodology.

To express your interest in participating, please e-mail the organizers at reality-workshop@media.mit.edu.

Organizers:
Benjamin N. Waber, MIT Media Laboratory
Lynn Wu, MIT Sloan School of Management

Confirmed Discussants:
Sinan Aral, NYU
Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT
Peter Gloor, MIT
David Lazer, Harvard
Alex "Sandy" Pentland, MIT

Workshop website: http://web.media.mit.edu/~bwaber/aom_workshop/

Posted by Ben Waber at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I wrote an entry last year for "happy flu", a clever experiment by Matthieu Latapy to study diffusion in networks. The basic idea was that some set of bloggers would post the code for a widget to their websites, and then other bloggers would copy that code in turn, allowing one to trace the spread of the code from blog to blog. Well, the data and a paper from those data is now available. Below is a movie tracing the diffusion of happy flu (I will have to check some time which node is this blog-- if you happen to look at the data please add a comment indicating where we are).

Posted by David Lazer at 12:12 PM | Permalink

I just came back from the three-day event (5/18-20) "ISPRAT 1st International Government CIO Knoweldge Exchange" in Washington, D.C. ISPRAT is a non-profit think tank based in Germany. The think tank's scope is on technology and innovation/trends in government and bridging the gap between disciplines. Thus ISPRAT's members come from industry, academia and government. Usually it organizes government CIO summits and government related studies in Germany. The U.S. event brought its activities to a new level. The underlying idea was to bring German/EU and U.S. government CIOs together to exchange ideas/experiences on current challenges and trends.

The first day was spent at CSC, Falls Church, VA, talking about identity management (linked to post @Shaping Network Society inspired by the movie "Beyond the shadow of a doubt"), privacy, trust and enterprise architecture (case stuides on MITA, IRS and DoE). Many might not be aware of it, but both areas - identity management and enterprise architecture - are fundamental to Government 2.0. A couple of former CIOs joined the discussion and offered their insights on issues such as cross-boundary collaboration: Dan Mintz (DoT), Pat Schambach (DHS) and Mark Kneidinger (NY, VA, DoS).

The morning of the second day we spent at the White House Conference Center. Officially Supported by GSA and the U.S. CIO Council , we had a couple of acting CIOs present to offer their insights in a roundtable discussion with German, Austrian and Mexican government executives. Unfortunately, Vivek Kundra couldn't come as he had to testify on Information Security on the hill. (Update 5/29: Read the Whitehouse Cyberspace Policy Review).Two take-aways. First, when talking about new collaboration tools, the CIOs admitted that it is quite a challenge to align social media with the existing laws and regulations--some dating back to the 70s--"they can get you fired, put you in jail or burden you with huge fines". Second, data.gov will go live on May 1st--it now is.

Using Cisco's telepresence center in Herndon, VA, the group--including gov execs sitting in Germany--exchanged thoughts with the Paul Cosgrave (NYC) and Teri Takai (California). It was the first time I participated in such a"video conference" (Cisco doesn't like that term) and I was amazed. The world really becomes a small place (D.C., L.A., New York, Berlin) and while there are still some minor glitches to it, you quickly emerge in a conversation that feels quite real. For dinner, we had Jackie Patillo, the acting CIO of DoT who was also willing to share her knowledge with the group.

The final day we spent time at IBM's Institute for eGovernment with an introductory part by Sherry Amos from SAP on the economic stimulus package and transparency. A vivid discussion started and I am curious to see how some ideas will be transferred to Germany/Europe. Many were skeptical about the use of Web 2.0 tools in the coming national election in Germany. Unlike the Obama campaign, Angela Merkel and Frank Walter Steinmeier, the candidates running for chancellor, lack a comparable story and mission. Moreover, a survey among participants conducted on the first day, showed that most perceived the level of transparency in government in Germany as rather poor. Other topics included: cloud computing (Among others, people wondered about: how does this connect the security needs of government?), government 2020 and "smart cities" (everything connected).

Several people twittered about the event: Ines Mergel (Ines also recently posted some Twitter recommendations), Anke Domscheit, Thomas Langkabel and Philipp Mueller.

We also managed to convince/bring Harald Lemke, the former CIO of the German State of Hesse, to the Twitter community.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 5:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the themes of this blog has been the potential of the study of digital traces of human behavior to offer into society. Well, I am pleased to announce here what may be viewed in years to come to be a landmark event in computational social science. Specifically, the Senseable City Lab is sponsoring an event, Engaging Data, focusing both on the scientific potential of these data, as well as on the many policy issues that swirl around the accumulation and analysis of personal information. Details below.

ENGAGING DATA
First International Forum on the Application and Management of Personal Electronic Information

Hosted by
SENSEable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Oct. 12-13, 2009
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA USA
senseable.mit.edu/engagingdata

CALL FOR PAPERS
Over the past decade, the development and use of digital networks has produced an increasing wealth of new data. Handheld electronics, locative media, telecommunications networks, and a wide assortment of tags and sensors are constantly collecting a rich stream of real-time information on various components of our lives and the environment we inhabit, including our movements, purchases, social interactions, Internet activities, and many more.

These data afford a wide range of research opportunities in the social and natural sciences that will create a multitude of beneficial information and services. Affected areas range widely and include, among others, workplace efficiency, traffic management, tourism, marketing, logistics, e-commerce, entertainment, urban and architectural planning, disaster response, security, environmental sustainability, and social interaction.

Advances in this field are progressing cautiously, however, as the public, commercial and social entities, and the government are only just beginning to understand this new condition of pervasive sensing and data mining as well as the associated framework required to manage it. Conflicting standards on privacy and fear of entering upon uncharted territories hinder companies, researchers, and others from engaging in activities that make responsible use of potentially sensitive data. Moreover, regulation has not kept pace with the changing digital infrastructure, and as a result different stakeholders currently face different restrictions on data usage. In short, we still lack a complete understanding of the societal value in this data and the influence on society by its use, and much still remains unexplored.

It is becoming imperative to develop a new framework of standards and best practices for collecting, storing, analyzing, reporting, sharing, and protecting valuable electronic data created by new technologies and services.

The Engaging Data: First International Forum on the Application and Management of Personal Electronic Information is the launching event of the Engaging Data Initiative, which will include a series of discussion panels and conferences at MIT. This initiative seeks to address the above issues by bringing together the main stakeholders from multiple disciplines, including social scientists, engineers, manufacturers, telecommunications service providers, Internet companies, credit companies and banks, privacy officers, lawyers, and watchdogs, and government officials.

The goal of this forum is to explore the novel applications for electronic data and address the risks, concerns, and consumer opinions associated with the use of this data. In addition, it will include discussions on techniques and standards for both protecting and extracting value from this information from several points of view: what techniques and standards currently exist, and what are their strengths and limitations? What holistic approaches to protecting and extracting value from data would we take if we were given a blank slate?

These issues and questions will be addressed through invited talks, paper presentations, and panel discussions. The forum will serve as a platform to exchange ideas, discuss the latest developments in this field, address significant issues, and create visions for the future.

The forum is seeking original contributions in the form of both position papers and technical papers. Of particular interest are papers that open new paths for research, express a creative vision for the future, and contribute to a lively debate.

TOPICS
Papers are solicited that propose principals and approaches to building a viable social ecosystem for using information mined from human interactions with digital networks. Each paper must touch on the technical, security, social, legal/political, and financial aspects of the issue, although it is expected that papers will concentrate more on some aspects than on others.

Topics of interest within these aspects include, but are not limited to, the following:

--Technical--
Uses and concerns associated with data collection and mining:

1. Information mined by an endpoint party to a communication, including:
-Types of information mined from consumer devices by endpoint parties (e.g. VoIP routers and radio handsets)
-Accuracy and use of location analyses based on IP addresses, Internet traceroutes, etc.
-Sharing of mined data with third parties
-Methodologies to analyze and visualize this data

2. Collection, storage, and use of information gathered from wireless networks, including:
-Location-based tracking and other forms of mobile sensing
-Mobile phones, cordless phones, walkie-talkies, wireless microphones
-Femtocells
-RFID systems
-Wi-Fi Networks
-Implications for "white spaces" signal-sensing devices
-Increased personalization of communications (i.e. device is commonly unique to a particular individual)
-Sharing of data with third parties

3. Collection of information on traffic flow patterns in fixed networks, including:
-How uses and concerns vary based on whether flows are segregated by endpoint, time-of-day, bandwidth usage level, application type, etc.
-Optical and non-optical networks
-Broadband networks
-Personal area networks (PAN), Local-area networks (LAN), Wide-area networks (WAN), etc.

4. Information collection inside the network
-Packet inspection, e.g. collection of IP addresses, HTTP cookies, etc.
-Significance of IPv6 in providing static IP addresses that may be specific to particular devices and/or their locations

5. Soundness of data
-Veracity, completeness, etc. of data collected from multiple perspectives, e.g. multiple sensors and/or points inside the network
-Algorithms and other tools to deal with incomplete, contradictory, and incorrect data

6. Data protection
-Effectiveness and adequacy of encryption, anonymization, aggregation, hashing algorithms, and level of accuracy of information at ensuring customer privacy
-Metadata standards and preservation formats


--Financial--
1. Business and incentive models/structures

--Security--
Social issues associated with data collection and mining:

1. Consumers and Privacy
-Privacy concerns and countervailing interests concerning the authentication of electronic identities and transactions
-Consumer awareness, e.g. how common it is for people to read privacy policies
-Consumer access to, control of, and awareness of information collected about them
-Ethical considerations and implications of data mining for both individuals and society
-Social norms and expectations of privacy

Legal and political issues associated with data collection and mining:

1. Standards for protecting and extracting value from data
-Strengths and limitations of existing standards
-"Blank slate," holistic approaches to protecting and extracting value from data
-Applicability of set standards, e.g. EC Data Protection Directive, to the US, developed vs. developing countries, globally

2. E-government services
-Appropriateness of permitting private entities preferential rights of access or redistribution of such data
-Conformity with citizen expectations and assurances of the privacy of such data

3. Legal and regulatory concerns
-Requirements, if any, for prior review and approval of proposed collection and use of data (IRB, etc.)
-Acceptable methods of obtaining consent for the use of various types of information
-Requirements of consent from parties related to the information, e.g. from only one party related to the information or from all parties related to the information
-Responsibilities to disclose mining of information (who must disclose such activities and to whom must disclosure be made, e.g. direct customer of service, correspondents of direct customer, etc.)
-Role of regulation in the exposure of information collected on network activities

4. Risk and Mitigation
-Evaluation and mitigation of risks of research, government, and commercial activities involving data collection and mining
-Methods of risk avoidance


AUTHOR GUIDELINES
Position papers must be 4-6 pages in length, technical papers 6-8 pages in length. Papers must be written in English and follow the standard IEEE format (two-column, single-spaced, 10-point font, on US Letter size paper). Please submit papers in PDF format. Templates can be found under: http://www.ieee.org/web/publications/pubservices/confpub/AuthorTools/conferenceTemplates.html

Each submitted paper will be peer-reviewed in a double-blind fashion. Please remove any mention of author names and affiliations in the entire submission, and if referencing previous work of the authors, use the third person. Papers will be evaluated according to originality, relevance, technical soundness, significance, and clarity.

At least one author must register for the conference to have the paper published in the proceedings.

The most exceptional papers in each category will be presented at the conference and published in the conference proceedings. All papers will be handled electronically and should be submitted online. An electronic submissions system will be available shortly. Please visit website for further details.

IMPORTANT DATES
Deadline for submission of full papers: July 13, 2009
Notification of acceptance: August 10, 2009
Camera-ready papers due: August 31, 2009
Early registration: August 31, 2009
Conference dates: October 12-13, 2009

GENERAL CHAIRS AND PROGRAM COMMITTEE
General Chairs
Carlo Ratti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Assaf Biderman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Technical Contributions Co-Chairs
Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
David Lazer, Harvard University

Program Committee
Ben Adida, Harvard University
Albert-László Barabási, Northeastern University
Dirk Brockmann, Northwestern University
John Clippinger, Harvard University
Alissa Cooper, Center for Democracy and Technology
Simon Davies, Privacy International
Laura DeNardis, Yale University
William Dutton, University of Oxford
Deborah Estrin, UCLA
Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology
Dean Gallant, Harvard University
Myron Gutmann, University of Michigan
Gary King, Harvard University
John Krumm, Microsoft Research
William Lehr, MIT
Marc Rotenberg, EPIC
Karen Sollins, MIT
Rebecca Wright, Rutgers University
Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard University

For questions regarding paper submissions, please contact Caitlin Zacharias: czachar@mit.edu.

Posted by David Lazer at 6:34 PM | Permalink

We have a bonus talk in the Cambridge Colloquium on Complexity and Social Networks:

Madhav Marathe (Virginia Tech)

"Decision and Policy Informatics for Large Co-Evolving Socio-Technical Networks"

Human behavior, social networks, and the civil infrastructures are closely intertwined. Understanding their co-evolution is critical when formulating public policies for sustainable societies. In this talk, I will summarize our ongoing integrated program to represent and reason about very large co-evolving social, technological, information and organization (STIO) networks. The program comprises of the following components: (i) a mathematical and computational theory of co-evolving STIO networks and (ii) an integrated high performance oriented pervasive cyber-environment that provides analysts and decision makers a web-based environment that provides seamless access to the models, data and synthetic information for policy planning and response.

After a brief overview, I will describe our approach as it pertains to epidemic processes in social and wireless networks. Understanding these epidemiological processes is of immense societal importance. Additionally they serve as excellent "model organisms" for developing a theory and informatics of co-evolving socio-technical networks. Perhaps more intriguing, recent advances in wireless communications provide compelling reasons for studying these networks together. I will discuss this possibility in my concluding remarks.

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The talk will be in Taubman 275 at noon. As usual, a light lunch will be served.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:03 PM | Permalink

Btw, example of CDC posting, as linked to by Twitter.

Update on School (K - 12) and Childcare Facilities: Interim CDC Guidance in Response to Human Infections with the Novel Influenza A (H1N1) Virus

May 5, 2009, 6:45 PM EDT
Background

Photo of school busThis document provides updated interim guidance for schools and childcare facilities regarding the prevention of the spread of novel influenza A (H1N1) virus.

Initial cases of novel influenza A (H1N1) in the United States included school-aged students and were associated with travel to Mexico and school-based outbreaks. Early information from Mexico indicated that many previously healthy young adults were hospitalized with rapidly progressive pneumonia, frequently resulting in respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation and death.

Based on this initial information, CDC recommended consideration of school closure as an option to lessen the risk of infection with this novel influenza virus in order to protect students, staff, parents and other caregivers from a potentially severe disease as well as limit spread into the community.

New information on disease severity and the extent of community spread warrant revision of the school closure guidance. As of May 4, 2009, more than 1000 confirmed or probable cases of novel influenza A (H1N1) have been reported from 44 states, with numerous disease clusters, indicating spread within communities that makes individual school closure less effective as a control measure. Most U.S. cases have not been severe and are comparable in severity to seasonal influenza. CDC and local and state health officials will continue to closely monitor the severity and spread of this novel H1N1 influenza outbreak.

At this time, CDC recommends the primary means to reduce spread of influenza in schools is to focus on early identification of ill students and staff, staying home when ill, and good cough and hand hygiene etiquette. Decisions about school closure should be at the discretion of local authorities based on local considerations, including public concern and the impact of school absenteeism and staffing shortages.
Recommendations

* School closure is not advised for a suspected or confirmed case of novel influenza A (H1N1) and, in general, is not advised unless there is a magnitude of faculty or student absenteeism that interferes with the school's ability to function.
* Schools that were closed based on previous interim CDC guidance related to this outbreak may reopen.
* Students, faculty or staff with influenza-like illness (fever with a cough or sore throat) should stay home and not attend school or go into the community except to seek medical care for at least 7 days even if symptoms resolve sooner.
* Students, faculty and staff who are still sick 7 days after they become ill should continue to stay home from school until at least 24 hours after symptoms have resolved.
* Students, faculty and staff who appear to have an influenza-like illness at arrival or become ill during the school day should be isolated promptly in a room separate from other students and sent home.
* Parents and guardians should monitor their school-aged children, and faculty and staff should self-monitor every morning for symptoms of influenza-like illness.
* Ill students should not attend alternative child care or congregate in settings other than school.
* School administrators should communicate regularly with local public health officials to obtain guidance about reporting of influenza-like illnesses in the school.
* Schools can help serve as a focus for educational activities aimed at promoting ways to reduce the spread of influenza, including hand hygiene and cough etiquette.
* Students, faculty and staff should stringently follow sanitary measures to reduce the spread of influenza, including covering their nose and mouth with a tissue when coughing or sneezing (or coughing or sneezing into their sleeve if a tissue isn't available), frequently washing hands with soap and water, or using hand sanitizer if hand washing with soap and water is not possible.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:09 PM | Permalink

And here is Felix Reed-Tsochas of Oxford on "Assembling and disassembling organizational (and other) networks"

Program on Networked Governance CCCSN Seminar 2009-04-14: Felix

Posted by David Lazer at 4:08 PM | Permalink

Fyi, here's the video of Jennifer Chayes of Microsoft Research on "Interdisciplinarity in the age of networks."

Program on Networked Governance CCCSN Seminar 2009-04-13: Jennifer Chayes from Networked Governance on Vimeo.

Posted by David Lazer at 4:06 PM | Permalink

For those of you in the Boston area, there's an interesting panel next week that I'll be on about privacy and technology. There will be an emphasis on social networks since this is related to the Media Lab's Sociable Media Group's exhibition called Connections. Here's the specifics:

Wednesday, May 6, 6:00 - 7:30 p.m.

Location: MIT Museum, 265 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge MA. 10 min. walk from Central Sq. or Kendall Sq. T stop
Free Admission. Light Refreshments will be served.

MODERATOR
Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

SPEAKERS
Judith Donath - Director of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab,
Shava Nerad - Development Director/ former Executive Director of The Tor Project -- providing anonymity online
Aaron Swartz - Founder of watchdog.net and reddit.com - dedicated to openess on the web.
Benjamin Waber- Researcher, Human Dynamics Group at the MIT Media Lab

DESCRIPTION
The exhibition Connections (through Sept. 13) was conceived from research done by the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, and includes the dynamic new installation, Metropath(ologies). In a world overflowing with information and non-stop communication this modular and interactive exhibition poses the question of how people's notions of privacy have changed the context of hyper-connected and hyper-aware real and virtual spaces. Where is the line between privacy and transparency in this new age? How have these issues affected the way people live in and think about their communities?

Posted by Ben Waber at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I am pleased to announce the second annual conference on Political Networks at Harvard (here at IQSS). The conference will take place June 12-13, and there will be dual track (intro and advanced) methods workshop on June 11. We have about 40 presentations in 3 parallel tracks, and 40+ posters (see full program). There will be keynotes by Brian Uzzi and Laszlo Barabasi. Registration is open now, where registration for the workshop is $80 ($40 for doctoral students), and $100 for the conference ($50 for doctoral students). Late registration fees apply starting June 1. Thanks go to the National Science Foundation and the Office for Naval Research for their support.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:35 AM | Permalink

The Human Dynamics Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory is organizing a workshop on "Sensor-based Models and Feedback Systems for Social Computing" at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing in Vancouver, Canada.

We would like to invite paper submissions and welcome attendance at the workshop.

For more information please visit:

http://web.media.mit.edu/~taemie/socialCom09/

Posted by Ben Waber at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This event will be of interest to many readers of this blog; perhaps even worth schlepping out to Boston to attend....

From Social Network to Social Movement

WEDNESDAY,
April 1, 2009
10:00am-4:30pm
John Chipman Gray
2nd Floor, Pound Hall
Harvard Law School
*Public invited, RSVP required

Digitally-connected social networks are fast becoming a key ingredient of today's social movements. But scholarship about networks - social, professional, and otherwise - has only just begun to penetrate political science and legal literatures. This workshop seeks to propel that integration. Key questions will include: given recent research insights about social movements, and new technology enabling transnational social networks, what are the points of synergy between successful social movements and robust social networks? What do today's digitally-connected social movements teach us about the relationship between networks and movements? Are online social networks merely a laboratory for testing empirical claims about social movements, or do they exhibit unique network properties? Do they perhaps offer new political opportunities?

This conference will include three separate workshop panels:

Workshop #1, 10:00am-12:00pm: Structures and Properties of "Network Power"

Using the idea that network position affects network power as a frame for the discussion - what are the properties of social network power? -- network experts will present their findings and set the stage for the day's discussion about how networked action can create political opportunities. Panelists include:

* David Lazer (moderator), Associate Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Program on Networked Governance, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

* Wendy Wong, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto

* David Grewal, Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows at Harvard University; author of NETWORK POWER

* Damon Centola, Assistant Professor of Behavioral and Policy Sciences, MIT Sloan School of Management

Workshop #2, 12:15pm-2:15pm: Narrative and the Network

Narratives are a key component of successful social movements - both for attracting new members, and sustaining the identities of current members. Are social networks similarly constituted by shared narratives? Can we identify universal components of social-change narratives? Panelists include:

* Marshall Ganz (moderator), Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

* Amy Kapczynski, Assistant Professor, Boalt Hall, U.C. Berkeley Law School

* Thomas Hegghammer, Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University

* Tammy Smith, Assistant Professor, Stony Brook University (SUNY)

Workshop #3, 2:30pm-4:30pm: Networked Activism - Explicitly Networked Movements

The final workshop will examine current social movements that rely explicitly on social networking tools, asking what challenges they face and under what conditions they are most likely to succeed. Panelists include:

* Ethan Zuckerman (moderator), Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

* Joe Green, Director of Facebook Causes

* Patrick Meier, PHD Candidate at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University

* Ben Wikler, Campaign Director for Avaaz.org

* Chris Csikszentmihályi, Director of the Computing Culture Group, MIT Media Lab

This conference is open to the public, although an RSVP is required to attend. Lunch will be provided for all individuals who RSVP. To RSVP, please email Amar Ashar at ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu by Tuesday, March 31, 2009.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:09 AM | Permalink

I am pleased to announce the addition of David Gibson to the blog. David is a former colleague of mine here at Harvard, and is now at Penn. David's work is squarely in the mission of this blog, focused around networks and computational modeling. In particular, he has done some wonderful work on conversational patterns in groups. His work represents part of what I see as the leading edge of a paradigm shift within the study of social networks, from the snapshot of an apparently slow moving social structure to a temporally fine grained interactionist perspective on human relations.

Some examples of his work:

"Taking Turns and Talking Ties: Network Structure and Conversational Sequences." American Journal of Sociology, 110:6 (2005): 1561-97.

"Concurrency and Commitment: Network Scheduling and its Consequences for Diffusion." Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 29:4 (2005): 295-323.

"Opportunistic Interruptions: Interactional Vulnerabilities Deriving from Linearization." Social Psychology Quarterly, 68:4 (2005) 316-37.

Posted by David Lazer at 7:55 PM | Permalink

A number of people asked if Tanzeem Choudhury's talk would be recorded and posted online. The answer is yes, and here it is. Please feel free to post comments/reactions to the talk.

Tanzeem Choudhury (Dartmouth)
Using Sensors to Make Sense of People: Inferring the Micro and Macro Level Properties of Social Networks from Mobile Sensor Data
March 2, 2009

Program on Networked Governance CCCSN Seminar 2009-03-02: Tanzeem Choudhury from Networked Governance on Vimeo.

Posted by David Lazer at 1:50 PM | Permalink

I am pleased to announce the latest iteration of the Cambridge Colloquium on Complexity and Social Networks, Spring 2009 edition. As always, a light lunch will be served.

David

____________________________________________

Cambridge Colloquium on Complexity and Social Networks (Spring 2009)

Tanzeem Choudhury (Dartmouth)
Using Sensors to Make Sense of People: Inferring the Micro and Macro Level Properties of Social Networks from Mobile Sensor Data
March 2, Taubman 275

Damon Centola (MIT)
Diffusion in Social Networks: New Theory and Experiments
April 6, Taubman 275

Jennifer Chayes (Microsoft Research)
TBD
April 13, Bell Hall (Belfer Building)

James Fowler (UCSD),
Genes and Social Networks
April 27, Bell Hall (Belfer Building)

Eszter Hargittai (Northwestern)
TBD
May 11, Bell Hall (Belfer Building)

ALL TALKS ARE AT NOON.

-------------

Using Sensors to Make Sense of People: Inferring the Micro and Macro Level Properties of Social Networks from Mobile Sensor Data

Abstract:
Human behavior in the real world is a difficult thing to study: it is not possible to have human observers follow someone around all day, and surveys often tend to biased and unreliable. On the other hand, sensor data is easy to collect but inferring human behavior from this data is still a challenging problem. In this talk, I will present the probabilistic framework we have developed for inferring the micro-level dynamics of human interactions as well as the macro-level social network structure from local, noisy sensor observations. By studying the micro and macro levels simultaneously we are able to explore the relationship between interaction dynamics (local behavior) and network prominence (a global property), and can identify the behavioral correlates of tie strengths within a network. We believe these methods have the potential to allow more quantitative inquiry into human behavior and social dynamics. They will also enable us to develop socially aware ubiquitous computing systems that are cognizant of and responsive to users' engagement with their social environment.

Bio:
Tanzeem Choudhury is an assistant professor in the computer science department at Dartmouth. She joined Dartmouth in 2008 after four years at Intel Research Seattle. She received her PhD from the Media Laboratory at MIT. Her research involves developing machine-learning techniques for systems that can reason about human activities, interactions, and social networks in everyday environments. Tanzeem's doctoral thesis demonstrated for the first time the feasibility of using wearable sensors to capture and model social networks automatically, on the basis of face-to-face conversations. She was recognized in MIT Technology Review's 2008 TR35 list for her work in this area.

Posted by David Lazer at 7:55 PM | Permalink

It's with sadness that I note that passing of Valerie Gregg. Valerie, as many of the readers fo this blog will know, was, along with Larry Brandt, one of the key architects of the Digital Government program at NSF (which, I would note, provided the resources to launch PNG). She played a key role in facilitating the emergence of a research community around technology and government, actively fostering domestic and international networks around this area. As discussions move forward today regarding how to utilize technology to make government more transparent, democratic, and effective, we should remember that one of the key people in enabling those discussions was Valerie.

More than that, everyone would agree, she was a mensch. She instantly changed the chemistry of every room she entered for the better. The world is a better place for her having graced us with her presence.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:01 AM | Permalink

ICPSR Summer Program 2009 Three- to Five-Day Statistical Workshops in Network Analysis (with dates and instructors)

Unless otherwise indicated, workshops are held in Ann Arbor Michigan, on the University of Michigan campus.

* Network Analysis: An Accelerated Introduction. April 17-April 19. Ann McCranie and Stan Wasserman

* Network Analysis: A Second Course. May 10-May 13. Ann McCranie and Stan Wasserman

* Network Analysis: Theory and Methods. July 6-July 10, Bloomington, IN. Bernice Pescosolido, Ann McCranie, and Stan Wasserman

* Social Networks. August 3-August 7, Chapel Hill, NC. Katie Faust

Additional information can be found at:
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/sumprog/2009/index.html

Please do not hesitate to email ICPSR if you have any questions or need further information:
sumprog@icpsr.umich.edu

Posted by Stan Wasserman at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I am pleased to announce a late addition to the AAAS panel, James Fowler. Details below.

Alone in the Crowd: The Structure and Spread of Loneliness in a Large Social Network

The discrepancy between an individual's perceived social isolation (ie., loneliness) and the number of connections in their social network is well documented. Yet, few details are known about the placement of loneliness within, or the spread of loneliness through, social networks. Using data from the Framingham Heart Study, we show that loneliness occurs in clusters within social networks, extends up to three degrees of separation, and is disproportionately represented at the periphery of social networks. In addition, loneliness appears to spread through a contagious process even though lonely individuals are moved closer to the edge of social networks over time. The spread of loneliness is stronger for friends than family members and stronger for women than for men. The results advance our understanding of the broad social forces involved and suggest that efforts to reduce loneliness in our society may benefit by aggressively targeting the people in the periphery to help repair their social networks and to create a protective barrier that can keep the whole network from unraveling.

Posted by David Lazer at 5:40 PM | Permalink

It occurred to me that some readers of this list might be interested in this summer school on networks. It has a heckuva line up, and an impossible to beat location.

Intensive course in
Networks and Innovation
Directors of the School: John Padgett, University of Chicago and University of Trento

Woody Powell, Stanford University
Lee Fleming, Harvard Business School

Massimo Riccaboni, University of Trento and University of Florence
Guest speakers: James Evans, University of Chicago

Sanjeev Goyal, University of Cambridge

Fernando Vega-Redondo, European University Institute

Program Directors: Axel Leijonhufvud, UCLA and University of Trento

Enrico Zaninotto, CIFREM University of Trento

Both network analysis and innovation studies are thriving fields, but have not always been integrated, in spite of the acknowledged importance of each to the other. Economic, political and scientific innovations occur in distributed networks of participants collaborating with each other. And social and biological networks of all types are evolving and dynamic, even if data about them often come as snapshots. The purposes of the summer school are to use network analysis to better understand the generation and diffusion of innovations, to use insights from innovation studies to develop models of network dynamics, and to develop the science of the co-evolution of networks and innovations.

The summer school at Trento is simultaneously a school, teaching contemporary theories and methods, and a workshop, wherein participants, both faculty and students, develop research and ideas to advance this frontier. The school is a call to the community of present and future researchers interested in pursuing this objective.

Across diverse application areas, the research questions asked will include:

* what are social mechanisms of recombination and learning?
* what are system dynamics of emergence and tipping?

Application topics will include:

* Santa Fe Institute style models of autocatalytic network in biological evolution
* Organizational invention in Renaissance Italy
* Innovation in the Life Sciences
* Innovation in the computer industry.

Specific methods in network analysis (e.g., structural cohesion, small worlds, diffusion and contagion, dynamical systems) will be covered in the context of the application areas in which they are used. Background readings will be drawn in part from a forthcoming book by Padgett and Powell, entitled "The Emergence of Organizations and Markets."

In addition to overview lectures in the mornings, the school will feature intensive seminar-style discussions in the afternoons of participants' research. Applicants therefore need to include statements about their current or projected research, along with relevant research papers, if any.

This is the Tenth of a series of intensive courses to be offered by the Computable and Experimental Economics Laboratory (CEEL) with the financial support of John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation.

People interested in participating in the Summer School are encouraged to apply by submitting a curriculum vitae, a two-page essay describing their interest in Networks and Innovation, a course transcript from their PhD program, including advanced examinations passed, two letters of recommendation, statements about their current or projected research, along with relevant research papers, if any.

The Trento Summer Schools are intended for Ph.D students and post-doctoral scholars.

Applications are due by 10 April 2009. We encourage electronic submissions. Admissions decisions will be made and announced by 30 April 2009. All applicants will be informed by e-mail about the results.

The sessions will be held at Centro Congressi Panorama (Sardagna - Trento, ITALY), a beautiful retreat in the Dolomite Mountains, readily accessible by cable car. All participants are required to stay for the entire duration of the event. Food and accommodation will be completely covered (participants will have to cover travel expenses and meals during the weekend).

Please direct logistical questions to the Summer School Secretary (ccschool@economia.unitn.it).
More information is available at: http://www-ceel.economia.unitn.it/summer_school/tenth/index.html

Posted by David Lazer at 7:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Along very similar lines as the Science paper noted below, for those of you attending AAAS next week there is a symposium I put together. Details below:

Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Large-Scale Human Networks

Date/time: Friday, Feb 13, 2009, 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Location: HRC Columbus GH

Symposium abstract: There is a small but rapidly emerging thread of research on large-scale human networks. This work is based on the digital traces people leave behind of their communications, through their use of e-mail, mobile phones, instant messaging, and many other tools of the information age. Until recently, the study of social networks (largely within sociology) was almost exclusively based on surveys of who has relationships with whom. As a result, most research on networks has involved a single snapshot of a small human system. In contrast, the more recent work on call log and instant messaging data involves massively longitudinal data on millions or hundreds of millions of people. It is, however, unclear what these data can tell us. What is the significance, for example, of a phone call between two people? Does it signify, for example, a friendship or a wrong number? The objective of this symposium is to pull together an interdisciplinary panel to discuss the scientific potential of these emerging large-scale network data. Disciplines represented include physics, information science, communications, sociology, medicine, political science, and computer science.

David Lazer, Harvard
Life in the Network: The Coming Age of Computational Social Science
Large-scale network analysis is based on massive amounts of observations of communication behavior, while small scale network analysis has been based on self report data. Whereas the scientific relevance of the latter has been well established, based on decades of research, it is less clear what the scientific significance of the former. This talk, using illustrations from a variety of data sources, will examine the scientific potential of large scale network analysis.

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
People in Motion: Studying Human Movement Based on Mobile Phone Data
The next challenge of network research is to go beyond the structure and quantify the dynamics of interconnected systems. A particular difficult facet of this research requires us to understand the temporal and spatial driving forces that govern social, technological and biological networks. I plan to focus on the opportunities offered by large datasets collected by mobile phone carriers to explore the dynamical mechanism that drive the activity of social networks as well as the travel pattern of individuals in social systems.

Alex Pentland, MIT
Honest Signals Predict Outcomes in Face-to-Face Interaction Networks
We have developed a wearable sensor `badge', called a sociometer, and used it to analyze thousands of hours of face-to-face interactions among networks of hundreds of people in common situations. These experiments demonstrate that up to 40% of variation in human behavior can be attributed to biological `honest signaling,' an unconscious, evolutionarily ancient communication channel. We demonstrate that these honest signals play a fundamental role in human decision making, and are predictive of outcomes in social situations ranging from dating to sales to business management and productivity.

Noshir Contractor, Northwestern
Digital Traces: An Exploratorium for Understanding and Enabling Social Networks
Recent advances in digital technologies invite consideration of organizing as a process that is accomplished by global, flexible, adaptive, and ad hoc networks that can be created, maintained, dissolved, and reconstituted with remarkable alacrity. These technologies also provide comprehensive digital traces of social actions, interactions, and transactions. These data provide an unprecedented Exploratorium to model the socio-technical motivations for creating, maintaining, dissolving, and reconstituting knowledge and social networks. Using examples from research in a wide range of activities such as disaster response, digital media and learning, public health and massively multiplayer online games (WoW - the World of Warcraft), Contractor will present a visual-analytic framework that is being used to Discover, Diagnose, and Design our social and knowledge networks.

Alessandro Vespignani, Indiana University
Mobility Networks and Contagion Processes
Transportation and mobility networks vary over many time and spatial scales and span international, inter-cultural and linguistic boundaries. The multi-scale nature and complexity of these networks are crucial features in the understanding of epidemic, contagion and connectivity processes in both the biological world and the ITC domain defined by the novel WiFi technologies. The presentation will discuss the central statistical features of these networks and the recently developed mathematical tools for the study of weighted and time dependent complex networks. Finally, we will review the impact of the complex features of mobility networks in the definition and study of stylized and realistic contagion models.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:27 AM | Permalink

One of the key themes of this blog has been that social science will/should undergo a transformation over the next generation, driven by the availability of new data sources, as well as the computational power to analyze those data. I, along with many collaborators, address these issues in a paper coming out tomorrow in Science on "Computational social science" (the original title-- Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science-- was more evocative but too wordy). In any case, while I cannot post the final version of the paper, I can post the version we submitted:

Computational social science

David Lazer (Harvard University), Alex (Sandy) Pentland (MIT), Lada Adamic (University of Michigan), Sinan Aral (NYU), Albert Laszlo Barabási (Northeastern University), Devon Brewer (Interdisciplinary Scientific Research), Nicholas Christakis (Harvard University), Noshir Contractor (Northwestern University), James Fowler (UCSD), Myron Gutmann (University of Michigan), Tony Jebara (Columbia University), Gary King (Harvard University), Michael Macy (Cornell University), Deb Roy (MIT), Marshall Van Alstyne
(Boston University)

We live life in the network. When we wake up in the morning, we check our e-mail, make a quick phone call, walk outside (our movements captured by a high definition video camera), get on the bus (swiping our RFID mass transit cards) or drive (using a transponder to zip through the tolls). We arrive at the airport, making sure to purchase a sandwich with a credit card before boarding the plane, and check our BlackBerries shortly before takeoff. Or we visit the doctor or the car mechanic, generating digital records of what our medical or automotive problems are. We post blog entries confiding to the world our thoughts and feelings, or maintain personal social network profiles revealing our friendships and our tastes. Each of these transactions leaves digital breadcrumbs which, when pulled together, offer increasingly comprehensive pictures of both individuals and groups, with the potential of transforming our understanding of our lives, organizations, and societies in a fashion that was barely conceivable just a few years ago.

The capacity to collect and analyze massive amounts of data has unambiguously transformed such fields as biology and physics. The emergence of such a data-driven "computational social science" has been much slower, largely spearheaded by a few intrepid computer scientists, physicists, and social scientists. If one were to look at the leading disciplinary journals in economics, sociology, and political science, there would be minimal evidence of an emerging computational social science engaged in quantitative modeling of these new kinds of digital traces. However, computational social science is occurring, and on a large scale, in places like Google, Yahoo, and the National Security Agency. Computational social science could easily become the almost exclusive domain of private companies and government agencies. Alternatively, there might emerge a "Dead Sea Scrolls" model, with a privileged set of academic researchers sitting on private data from which they produce papers that cannot be critiqued or replicated. Neither scenario will serve the long-term public interest in the accumulation, verification, and dissemination of knowledge.

What potential value might a computational social science, based in an open academic environment, offer society, through an enhanced understanding of individuals and collectives? What are the obstacles that stand in the way of a computational social science?

From individuals to societies

To date the vast majority of existing research on human interactions has relied on one-shot self-reported data on relationships. New technologies, such as video surveillance, e-mail, and 'smart' name badges offer a remarkable, second-by-second picture of interactions over extended periods of time, providing information about both the structure and content of relationships. Consider examples of data collection in this area and of the questions they might address:

Video recording and analysis of the first two years of a child's life (1): Precisely what kind of interactions with others underlies the development of language? What might be early indicators of autism?

Examination of group interactions through e-mail data: What are the temporal dynamics of human communications--that is, do work groups reach a stasis with little change, or do they dramatically change over time (2 , 3)? What interaction patterns predict highly productive groups and individuals? Can the diversity of news and content we receive predict our power or performance (4)?

Examination of face-to-face group interactions over time using sociometers: Small electronics packages ('sociometers') worn like a standard ID badge can capture physical proximity, location, movement, and other facets of individual behavior and collective interactions. What are patterns of proximity and communication within an organization, and what flow patterns are associated with high performance at the individual and group levels (5)?

Macro communication patterns: Phone companies have records of call patterns among their customers extending over multiple years, and e-Commerce portals such as Google and Yahoo collect instant messaging data on global communication. Do these data paint a comprehensive picture of societal-level communication patterns? What does the "macro" social network of society look like (6), and how does it evolve over time? In what ways do these interactions affect economic productivity or public health?

Tracking movement: With GPS and related technologies, it is increasingly easy to track the movements of people (7, 8). Mobile phones, in particular, allow the large scale tracing of people's movements and physical proximities over time (9), where it may be possible to infer even cognitive relationships, such as friendship, from observed behavior (10). How might a pathogen, such as influenza, driven by physical proximity, spread through a population (11)?

Internet: The Internet offers an entirely different channel for understanding what people are saying, and how they are connecting (12). Consider, for example, in this political season, tracing the spread of arguments/rumors/positions in the blogosphere (13), as well as the behavior of individuals surfing the Internet (14), where the concerns of an electorate become visible in the searches they conduct. Virtual worlds, by their nature capturing a complete record of individual behavior, offer ample opportunities for research, for example, experimentation that would be impossible or unacceptable (15). Similarly, social network websites offer an unprecedented opportunity to understand the impact of a person's structural position on everything from their tastes to their moods to their health (16), while Natural Language Processing offers increased capacity to organize and analyze the vast amounts of text from the Internet and other sources (17).

In short, a computational social science is emerging that leverages the capacity to collect and analyze data with an unprecedented breadth and depth and scale. Substantial barriers, however, might limit progress. Existing ways of conceiving human behavior were developed without access to terabytes of data describing their minute-by-minute interactions and locations of entire populations of individuals. For example, what does existing sociological network theory, built mostly on a foundation of one-time 'snapshot' data, typically with only dozens of people, tell us about massively longitudinal datasets of millions of people, including location, financial transactions, and communications? The answer is clearly "something," but, as with the blind men feeling parts of the elephant, limited perspectives provide only limited insights. These emerging data sets surely must offer some qualitatively new perspectives on collective human behavior.

There are significant barriers to the advancement of a computational social science both in approach and in infrastructure. In terms of approach, the subjects of inquiry in physics and biology present different challenges to observation and intervention. Quarks and cells neither mind when we discover their secrets nor protest if we alter their environments during the discovery process (although, as discussed below, biological research involving humans offers some similar concerns regarding privacy). In terms of infrastructure, the leap from social science to a computational social science is larger than from, say, biology to a computational biology, in large part due to the requirements of distributed monitoring, permission seeking, and encryption. The resources available in the social sciences are significantly smaller, and even the physical (and administrative) distance between social science departments and engineering or computer science departments tends to be greater than for the other sciences. The availability of easy-to-use programs and techniques would greatly magnify the presence of a computational social science. Just as mass-market CAD software revolutionized the engineering world decades ago, common computational social science analysis tools and the sharing of data will lead to significant advances. The development of these tools can, in part, piggyback on those developed in biology, physics and other fields, but also requires substantial investments in applications customized to social science needs.

Perhaps the thorniest challenges exist on the data side, with respect to access and privacy. Many, though not all, of these data are proprietary (e.g., mobile phone and financial transactional data). The debacle following AOL's public release of "anonymized" search records of many of its customers highlights the potential risk to individuals and corporations in the sharing of personal data by private companies (18). Robust models of collaboration and data sharing between industry and the academy need to be developed that safeguard the privacy of consumers and provide liability protection for corporations.

More generally, properly managing privacy issues is essential. As the recent NRC report on GIS data highlights, it is often possible to pull individual profiles out of even carefully anonymized data (19). To take a non-social science example: this past Summer NIH and the Wellcome Trust abruptly removed a number of genetic databases from online access (20). These databases were seemingly anonymized, simply reporting the aggregate frequency of particular genetic markers. However, research revealed the potential for de-anonymization, based on the statistical power of the sheer quantity of data collected from each individual in the database (21).

A single dramatic incident involving a breach of privacy could produce a set of statutes, rules, and prohibitions that could strangle the nascent field of computational social science in its crib. What is necessary, now, is to produce a self-regulatory regime of procedures, technologies, and rules that reduce this risk but preserve most of the research potential. As a cornerstone of such a self-regulatory regime, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) must increase their technical knowledge enormously to understand the potential for intrusion and individual harm because new possibilities do not fit their current paradigms for harm. For example, many IRBs today would be poorly equipped to evaluate the possibility that complex data could be de-anonymized. Further, it may be necessary for IRBs to oversee the creation of a secure, centralized data infrastructure. Certainly, the status quo is a recipe for disaster, where existing data sets are scattered among many different groups, with uneven skills and understanding of data security, with widely varying protocols.

Researchers themselves must tackle the privacy issue head on by developing technologies that protect privacy while preserving data essential for research (22). These systems, in turn, may prove useful for industry in managing privacy of customers and security of their proprietary data.

Finally, the emergence of a computational social science shares with other nascent interdisciplinary fields (e.g., sustainability science) the need to develop a paradigm for training new scholars. A key requirement for the emergence of an interdisciplinary area of study is the development of complementary and synergistic explanations spanning different fields and scales. Tenure committees and editorial boards need to understand and reward the effort to publish across disciplines (23). Certainly, in the short run, computational social science needs to be the work of teams of social and computer scientists. In the longer run, the question will be: should academia be building computational social scientists, or teams of computationally literate social scientists and socially literate computer scientists?

The emergence of cognitive science in the 1960s and 1970s offers a powerful model for the development of a computational social science. Cognitive science emerged out of the power of the computational metaphor of the human mind. It has involved fields ranging from neurobiology to philosophy to computer science. It attracted the investment of substantial resources to establish a common field, and it has created enormous progress for public good in the last generation. We would argue that a computational social science has a similar potential, and is worthy of similar investments.

References:

1. D. Roy, R. Patel, P. DeCamp, R. Kubat, M. Fleischman, B. Roy, N. Mavridis, S. Tellex, A. Salata, J. Guiness, M. Levit, P. Gorniak. 2006. "The Human Speechome Project," Twenty-eighth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
2. JP Eckmann, E. Moses, D. SergI. 2004. "Entropy of dialogues creates coherent structures in e-mail traffic," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101: 14333-14337.
3. Kossinets, G. & D. Watts. 2006. "Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network." Science (311:5757): 88-90.
4. S. Aral, M. Van Alstyne. 2007. "Network Structure & Information Advantage" Proceedings of the Academy of Management Conference, Philadelphia, PA.
5. Pentland. A. 2008. Honest Signals: how they shape our world, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
6. J.-P. Onnela, J. Saramäki, J. Hyvönen, G. Szabó, D. Lazer, K. Kaskil, J. Kertész, A.-L. Barabási. 2007. "Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
7. B. Shaw, T. Jebara. 2007. "Minimum Volume Embedding," Proceedings of the Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics.
8. T. Jebara, Y. Song, K. Thadani. 2007. "Spectral Clustering and Embedding with Hidden Markov Models", Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning".
9. M. C. González, C. A. Hidalgo, A.-L. Barabási. 2008. Understanding individual human mobility patterns Nature 453: 779-782.
10. N. Eagle, A. Pentland, D. Lazer. 2008. "Inferring friendships from behavioral data," HKS working paper.
11. V. Colizza, A.Barrat, M. Barthelemy, and A. Vespignani. 2006. "Prediction and predictability of global epidemics: the role of the airline transportation network," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103: 2015-2020.
12. D. Watts. Connections A twenty-first century science, Nature 445: 489.
13. L. Adamic, N. Glance. 2005. The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election Divided They Blog, LinkKDD-2005, Chicago, IL.
14. J. Teevan. 2008. "How People Recall, Recognize and Re-Use Search Results," To appear in ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) special issue on Keeping, Re-finding, and Sharing Personal Information.
15. W. Bainbridge. 2007. "The scientific research potential of virtual worlds," Science 317. no. 5837: 472 - 476.
16. K. Lewis, J. Kaufman, M. Gonzalez, A. Wimmer, and N. Christakis. 2009. "Tastes, Ties, and Time: A New (Cultural, Multiplex, and Longitudinal) Social Network Dataset Using Facebook.com." Social Networks, in press.
17. C. Gardie, J. Wilkerson. 2008. Text annotation for political science research, Journal of Information Technology and Politics 5: 1-6.
18. M. Barbarao, T. Zeller Jr. 2006. "A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749, New York Times, (August 9).
19. National Research Council. 2007. Putting People on the Map: Protecting Confidentiality with Linked Social-Spatial Data. Ed. Myron P. Gutmann and Paul Stern. Washington: National Academy Press.
20. J. Felch. August 29, 2008. DNA databases blocked from the public. LA Times.
21. N Homer, S Szelinger, M Redman, D Duggan, W Tembe. 2008. "Resolving Individuals Contributing Trace Amounts of DNA to Highly Complex Mixtures Using High-Density SNP Genotyping Microarrays," PLoS Genetics 4(8): e1000167. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000167
22. L. Backstrom, C. Dwork, J. Kleinberg. 2007. Wherefore Art Thou R3579X? Anonymized Social Networks, Hidden Patterns, and Structural Steganography. Proc. 16th Intl. World Wide Web Conference.
23. M. Van Alstyne, E. Brynjolfsson. 1996. "Could the Internet Balkanize Science?" Science. 274: 1479-1480.

------------------------------------------------
Full reference for this paper: David Lazer, Alex Pentland, Lada Adamic, Sinan Aral, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Devon Brewer, Nicholas Christakis, Noshir Contractor, James Fowler, Myron Gutmann, Tony Jebara, Gary King, Michael Macy, Deb Roy, and Marshall Van Alstyne, "Computational Social Science," Science 6 February 2009: 721-723.

Posted by David Lazer at 8:56 PM | Permalink

It is my pleasure to announce the second annual conference on Political Networks, to be held at Harvard this coming June 12-13. This a follow up to the conference last year, which was meant to be a workshop for about 50 and turned into a substantial conference of over 200.

The full call is below.

Political Networks Call for Proposals

The Political Networks conference will be held June 12-13, 2009 at Harvard University. This is a sequel to the "Networks in Political Science" (NIPS) conference at Harvard last year that attracted over 200 participants.

Preceding the conference, there will be a series of workshops introducing existing substantive areas of research, statistical methods (and software packages) for dealing with the distinctive dependencies of network data, and network visualization.

The deadline for submitting a paper proposal is March 1, 2009.

You should submit proposals proposals online. Proposals should include a title and a one-paragraph abstract.

The National Science Foundation is supporting a limited number of competitive fellowships to defray the costs of attendance for doctoral students and recent (post 2006) PhDs. Funding may be available for graduate students not presenting papers, but preference will be given to students using network analysis in their dissertations. Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply.

Applications for funding should be submitted online, and should include a CV, one letter of recommendation, and a brief statement about intended use of network analysis.

The final program will be posted on this blog.

Political Networks is supported by the National Science Foundation, and sponsored by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance at Harvard University.

We look forward to seeing you there!
David Lazer, Harvard
James Fowler, UCSD

Posted by David Lazer at 7:15 PM | Permalink

It is my pleasure to announce that the book: The State of Access: Success and Failure of Democracies to Create Equal Opportunities is now available from Brookings.

The book has been written by a diverse set of scholars and presents up-to-date insights from around the globe into failures and solutions to providing citizens equal access to public services, economic opportunities, justice and participation in the democratic process. Public managers and others trying to narrow the gap face the challenge of complexity. How should they prioritize? How many cause and effect relationships do exist and which one should be tackled first? How can those in need be identified best?

In any case, true democratic governance is too important, so all of should ask us what we can do to realize it.

Feedback can be given at the Improving Access-Org Website.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 5:06 PM | Permalink

You can now read the papers from ICIS 2008 online. The best paper I mentioned in my last post can be found here. Some of you might be interested in the paper Emmanuelle Vaast and I presented, entitled "Bringing Change in Government Organizations: Evolution Towards Post-Bureaucracy with Web-Based IT Projects". We used an evolutionary perspective to explain how government organizations move toward a post-bureaucratic form of organization. Below is the abstract:

This paper examines the following question: How do government organizations become
more "post-bureaucratic" with web-based IT projects? It draws on evolutionary thinking
to conceptualize processes of change in government organizations as involving sequences
of variation, selection, and retention as well as to identify various sources of change:
internal ones (e.g. administrators), as well as external ones (e.g. technological
innovations and institutional pressures). The paper relates findings from four in-depth
qualitative case studies of web-based IT projects in different government organizations.
The interpretation of these findings helps expand the evolutionary conceptualization by
suggesting how different sources of change interact in the change process and variously
affect different stages of the evolution.

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Greetings from the City of Lights - I am happy to report that our fellow blogger Ben Waber just received the Best Paper Award here at ICIS 2008 for the following paper, co-authored with Lynn Wu, Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland:

"Mining Face-to-Face Interaction Networks Using Sociometric Badges: Predicting Productivity in an IT Configuration Task"

Congrats, Ben!

For those of you attending the conference, the paper will be presented Tuesday, Dec 16 at 10:30am in room 352A.

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 8:38 AM | Permalink

FYI, for those of you in Boston, you should note that Sandy Pentland will be talking about his provocative new book, Honest Signals: How They Shape our World, on November 24 (details below). Note, also, that MIT Press has offered a 20% discount to readers of this blog, through the end of this year. Just go the MIT Press site, and provide the discount code: PENTLAZER.

Honest Signals

November 24

Taubman-275 (Room subject to change)

12-1:30pm

Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland
Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Co-Director, Digital Life Consortium
Faculty Sponsor, Next Billion Network and EPROM in Africa
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These predictive patterns seem to be biologically based "honest signals," evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, and we find that they are major factors in human decision making in situations ranging from job interviews to first dates.

By analyzing these signals using data from electronic ID badges and specially-programmed smart phones, we can create a "gods eye" view of how the people in organizations interact, and even `see' the rhythms of interaction for everyone in a city.

---

Professor Alex ("Sandy") Pentland is a pioneer in organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science. Sandy's focus is the development of human-centered technology, and the creation of ventures that take this technology into the real world.

He directs the Digital Life Consortium, a group of more than twenty multinational corporations exploring new ways to innovate, and oversees the Next Billion Network, established to support aspiring entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and the EPROM entrepreneurship program in Africa. He is among the most-cited computer scientists in the world, and in 1997 Newsweek magazine named him one of the 100 Americans likely to shape this century.

Posted by David Lazer at 4:19 PM | Permalink

Nine Imperatives for Leadership of 311-Enabled Government
November 13, 2008: 2:30 - 4:30 pm (EST)

~Online event. Registration required, and free of charge.~

Join us for this free, interactive discussion outlining the findings and discoveries of a report about the "next wave of 311," generated by 25 government leaders and technology and service providers convened at Harvard.

The forum will be moderated by former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who is the Dan Paul Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. The panel includes:

* Michael A. Sarasti, Manager, Strategic Customer Research & Development, Government Information Center, Miami-Dade County
* Neil Evans, 311 Project Director, City of Toronto, Ontario
* Joe Morrisroe, Deputy Commissioner & Executive Director: NYC 311 and NYC.gov
* Gerard Gallant - General Manager, Public Service/311, Motorola
* Zachary Tumin - Executive Director, HKS Leadership for a Networked World Program

For more information and to register for this event, please visit our event page at:

http://www.innovations.harvard.edu/spotlight.html?id=1561&preview=0

Also, when you register for the Government Innovators Network, we encourage you to sign up for our biweekly e-newsletter on emerging government innovations, Innovators Insights. Just be sure to check "yes" at the bottom of the registration page to subscribe to the newsletter. If you've already registered, simply log in to our site, and click "my profile" in the upper right-hand corner to update your subscriptions.

Registration to online event.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 5:03 AM | Permalink

My colleague, Archon Fung, in conjunction with ABC news, has launched a "crowd sourcing" initiative to identify problems at polling places, called MyFairElection. A full description is below. Please do forward on this information, and contribute information to the project. Here are the details:

MyFairElection is an exciting project to help make the vote fair and accessible this November 4th. To participate, simply sign up (instructions below) to rate your experience of voting this year.

Did you encounter specific problems such as long lines, confusing ballots, broken machines, or closed polling places? Or, was the process of voting quite pleasant and easy?

As thousands of citizens rate their voting experiences, MyFairElection will produce a real-time "weather map" of voting conditions across the country. This map will allow viewers to see where it is easy to vote, and where people have encountered obstacles. Journalists, advocates, officials, and citizens can use this map to address obstacles to voting in real time.

So, go to this link and sign up. You will be asked to rate your voting experience on election day. You can comment, describe particular problems, and even submit pictures.

MyFairElection.com is a project of MyFairElection and ABC News. ABC News will feature the heat map as part of their election day coverage. Journalists will use the information that you submit to help identify and report on election day ballot problems.

Here are more detailed instructions.

Register [Do this before election day, November 4!]

In order to submit your polling place observations, you must create an account on MyFairElection.com.

Step 1: Use an Internet browser (such as Explorer, FireFox, or Safari) on your computer to go to this link:

Step 2: In the upper left hand corner, you will see a box to "Sign up Now." Enter your email address, your zip code, then click "submit."

Step 3: You will receive an email message from MyFairElection.com. Keep this message! You will use the link in that message to submit your polling place ratings on election day.

You will also receive an email message from myfairelection.com on election day reminding you to vote and to rate your voting experience.

Rate a polling place on the web:

Step 1: Go to the link provided in your registration email message. It will look something like this:http://myfairelection.com/rate/7ebe4eb. You don't have to type it in; just click on the link from your email program or copy the link and paste it into your browser window.

If you've deleted the email message from MyFairElection.com or can't find it, just register again. You'll receive another message with the link.

Step 2: After you clink on the link, your browser will take you to the ratings page.

Use the ratings page to tell us about your polling experience: one star is terrible and five stars is excellent.

You can also report specific problems, offer general comments, and even upload pictures of your voting experience on this page. After you've filled in the appropriate spaces, click "Submit."

That's it! Use the map of the U.S. that will appear on myfairelection.com on November 4th to view ratings from people all over the country.

Rate a polling place by email:

If you're on the road on election day, you can also submit ratings by email, on a PDA such as a BlackBerry or iPhone. Note that we will accept email ratings only from registered users.

Step 1: Create a new email message addressed to rate@myfairelection.com

Step 2: In the body of that email message, enter
(1) your zip-code
(2) 1 to 5 asterisks ("***") for overall rating
(3) any comments you might have [one line only!]

And send the message! You will receive an email message that verifies receipt of your rating.

Thank you for participating in MyFairElection!

Posted by David Lazer at 10:12 AM | Permalink

The following event PNG is sponsoring might be of interest to readers of this blog:

Marc Smith--Online tutorial for Excel .NetMap October 27, 2008: 12-2 pm (EDT)

~Online event. Registration required, and free of charge.~

Note that there is a small chance that we will hit the capacity limit of 200, so register ahead of time:

This url also has links to where you can download the software, information on technical requirements for logging on, etc.

(Excel) .NetMap is an add-in for Office 2007 that provides social network diagram and analysis tools in the context of a spreadsheet. Adding the directed graph chart type to Excel opens up many possibilities for easily manipulating networks and controlling their display properties.

In this tutorial the steps needed to install and operate (Excel) .NetMap are reviewed. The (Excel) .NetMap add-in provides directed graph charting features within Excel, allowing users to create node-link diagrams with control over each node and edge color, size, transparency and shape. Since .NetMap builds within Excel, all of the controls and programmatic features
of Office are available. Additional features of (Excel) .NetMap generate social networks from data sources like personal e-mail (drawing data from the Windows Desktop Search engine). Arbitrary edge lists (anything that can be pasted into Excel) can be visualized and analyzed in .NetMap.

Marc Smith is the soon to be Chief Social Scientist at Telligent, and recently of Microsoft Research specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. He founded the Community Technologies Group and is now part of the Internet Services Research Center at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley. He is the co-editor of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups.

Smith's research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many "groups" in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (see related papers). Smith's goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. He has developed the "Netscan" engine that allows researchers studying Usenet newsgroups to get reports on the rates of posting, posters, crossposting, thread length and frequency distributions of activity. These data have revealed a complex online social ecosystem populated by multiple social roles.

This session will provide a walk through the basic operation of .NetMap. Techniques for time slicing and filtering networks will be highlighted. You may download the Excel .NetMap Add-in and slides visit in advance of this tutorial.

Posted by David Lazer at 12:20 PM | Permalink

Please see the remaining schedule for Cambridge Colloquium on Complexity and Social Networks for the Fall, 2008. Please note that a light lunch will be served at events. If you would like to be added to the e-mail list for announcements about CCCSN, please e-mail david_fishman@ksg.harvard.edu.

Best,

David Lazer, Director
Program on Networked Governance

CAMBRIDGE COLLOQUIUM ON COMPLEXITY AND SOCIAL NETWORKS
(all talks are 12-1:30)

October 20: Economic complexity and growth

Fainsod Room (Littauer building)

Cesar Hidalgo
Center for International Development
Harvard University

October 27: Using (Excel) .NetMap for Social Network Analysis

Marc Smith
(recently of Microsoft Research)

IMPORTANT, THIS IS AN ONLINE ONLY EVENT: URL to be posted on the blog shortly before the event.

This will be an online tutorial for.NetMap, a free add-in for Excel 2007 that provides social network diagram and analysis tools in the context of a spreadsheet. To download the Excel .NetMap Add-in and slides visit: http://www.codeplex.com/netmap.

November 24: Honest Signals

Taubman 275

Alex (Sandy) Pentland
Media Lab, MIT

DETAILS ON NEXT EVENT:

Economic complexity and growth
Cesar Hidalgo, Harvard University

We develop a new general tool to capture the information contained in the links of a bipartite network and apply it to the relationship between countries and the products they export. The method is based on the calculation of the average properties of a node's neighbors, where the neighbors of a country are the products that it exports and the neighbors of a product are the countries that export it. We show that our measures are highly correlated with a country's GDP per capita. More importantly, we show that these measures are predictive of a country's future economic growth and of some of the properties of the new exports that a country will develop over time. This method can be iterated by successively calculating the average nearest neighbor properties of the previous measure. Surprisingly, the information on income and growth extracted through our method increases with each iteration, indicating that our approach captures information about the productive structure of countries that matters for economic growth and development.

Posted by David Lazer at 9:23 AM | Permalink

This conference, in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Watts and Strogatz paper, might be of interest to some on this list:

BCNetWORKSHOP 2008
Physics Department, University of Barcelona, Spain, from Wednesday 10 to Friday 12 December 2008.

Important deadlines:

Early registration: 15 October 2008
Late registration: 1 December 2008
Abstract submission: 1 November 2008
Communication of accepted abstracts: 15 November 2008
Communication of final program: 1 December 2008

You can register and find further information at the website , which will be
updated and completed as the workshop proceeds.

In commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the celebrated paper by Watts and Strogatz on small-world networks, this event will bring together researchers in complex network science and related areas. Time has come to ask what have been the major contributions of this emerging field to prospect its future and open questions in perspective. To this end, internationally recognized specialists will be invited to explain their current investigations and to discuss the expected progress of their research within the context of the field. The workshop will present as well a maximum of twenty selected contributions compliant with its purpose. An open colloquium session will also be organized where keynote speakers, participants, and committee members will have the opportunity to debate all together on the present situation of complex networks science and its outlook.

We are pleased to announce the following list of keynote speakers:

Jordi Bascompte, Spanish Research Council (CSIC), Spain
Bernd Blasius, University of Oldenburg, Germany
Víctor Eguíluz, IFISC (CSIC-UIB), Spain
Roger Guimerà, Northwestern University, USA
Dmitri Krioukov, CAIDA, University of California San Diego, USA
David Lazer, Harvard University, USA
Adilson E. Motter, Northwestern University, USA
Kim Sneppen, Niels Bohr Institute, Denmark
Duncan Watts, Columbia University, USA

Posted by David Lazer at 7:02 PM | Permalink

As part of a broader effort around building research capacity on network methods in political science, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard will be sponsoring the 2009 Political Networks Conference.

We anticipate a format similar to the 2008 NIPS conference, with workshops followed by panel presentations of original work. We hope to once again bring together an interdisciplinary group of people interested in applying network methods to the study of political phenomena.

We will put out a call for papers and provide more details in January.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:55 AM | Permalink

One of our bloggers, Nathan Eagle just back from Africa, will be speaking on "Mobile Phones in Africa: Education, Entrepreneurship, and Research".

The talk will take place in the Fainsod Room (3rd floor, Littauer building) at the Harvard Kennedy School 12-1:30 on September 15. A light lunch will be served.

A fuller description:

Nathan Eagle: Mobile Phones in Africa: Education, Entrepreneurship, and Research

Today's mobile phones are designed to meet Western needs. Subscribers in developing countries, however, now represent the majority of the 3 billion mobile phone users worldwide. An increasing fraction of these users live in Africa, currently the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world. I will briefly introduce three projects that have been made possible by this unprecedented technology adoption in Africa:

The EPROM initiative aims to foster an entrepreneurial mobile phone developer community within Africa. Computer Science departments within ten Sub-Saharan countries are currently teaching the EPROM curriculum. I will discuss a selection of the hundreds of mobile phone applications being designed, developed, and field-tested by the African computer science undergraduates that have taken part in the project over the last 3 years.

txteagle is a mobile crowd-sourcing application that will be launching in Kenya this October on the Safaricom network. It enables people to earn and save small amounts of money by completing simple tasks on their phones for companies who pay them either in airtime or cash.

Most recently, we are engaged in a data-sharing agreement with mobile phone operators in Rwanda and Kenya. To complement the telecommunications data we received from British Telecom in 2005 and from Viva Telecom in the Dominican Republic, we will be using the Rwandan and Kenyan anonymized data to study the dynamics of their 10 million subscribers' behavioral patterns including communication, travel, product adoption, and airtime/money transfers. http://reality.media.mit.edu

And for those of you who don't know Nathan, he is a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. His research involves applying machine learning and network analysis techniques to large human behavioral datasets generated by mobile phones. He holds a BS and two MS degrees from Stanford University; his PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory on Reality Mining was recently declared one of the '10 technologies most likely to change the way we live' by the MIT Technology Review magazine. http://web.media.mit.edu/~nathan

Posted by David Lazer at 6:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sandy Pentland has written a new book on our group's research from the past 5 years: Honest Signals. Here's a summary:

How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Sandy Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based "honest signaling," evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates.

Pentland, an MIT professor, has used a specially designed digital sensor worn like an ID badge--a "sociometer"--to monitor and analyze the back-and-forth patterns of signaling among groups of people. He and his researchers found that this second channel of communication, revolving not around words but around social relations, profoundly influences major decisions in our lives--even though we are largely unaware of it. Pentland presents the scientific background necessary for understanding this form of communication, applies it to examples of group behavior in real organizations, and shows how by "reading" our social networks we can become more successful at pitching an idea, getting a job, or closing a deal. Using this "network intelligence" theory of social signaling, Pentland describes how we can harness the intelligence of our social network to become better managers, workers, and communicators.

I've read through an early edition, and in contrast to other pop science books like Freakanomics and Predictably Irrational (both of which are interesting reads), Honest Signals has the scientific details of the experiments that it talks about, in the form of a thorough 50-page appendix. For anyone interested in how sensing technology will change business and the sciences or who's interested in learning how people actually interact with each other, this is a must read.

Posted by Ben Waber at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I recently made an effort to track down the data from Theodore Newcomb's classic work on The Acquaintance Process. These were network and attitudinal data he collected from incoming students at the University of Michigan in the 1950s. These were unique, and costly data to collect. The network data were preserved by a student in a dissertation, and are now immortalized (?) in the data included with the UCINET software. However, to someone like me interested in how networks and people co-evolve (see my 2001 JMS paper on "The coevolution of individual and network"), having the attitudinal data over time is what made the data valuable.

After having retrieved the same dissertation, and spoken to Ken Frank, who had had similar thoughts some years ago and had actually dug through archives at Michigan, my sad conclusion is that these rich, unique, expensive, irreplaceable data are simply gone. (I am happy to be disabused of this notion if someone can prove I am wrong.)

This was terribly unfortunate, from my immediate perspective, because I had some need to replicate some findings with longitudinal data I had recently collected on networks and political attitudes, and this was one of the few data sets that fit the bill (in fact, I have not found _any_ other good longitudinal data sets on whole networks and political attitudes-- again, happy to find out that I am wrong about that).

The broader lesson I want to convey is that it is important to make your data publicly available. And I think this is especially important for (generally) micro, whole network data sets, because there are necessarily concerns about replication and external validity. There are concerns about replication, because of the possibility, esp with limited N's, that results were over-fitted to the particular data set. There are concerns about external validity, because even if the results are a fair representation of the data, there may be some quirk about the particular setting driving results.

So: it would be enormously valuable to be able to reach into a vast archive of all social network data sets ever gathered and, given appropriate variables, etc, replicate a set of findings (or not) across multiple data sets. (In fact, I think that such built in replication should be de rigeur in published studies of micro settings. But that's a story for another day.)

That is simply not possible now. And data are dying every day, as files get thrown out, people's memories fade, etc. Say, if one went to social network research published in ASQ from the 1990s, how many of those data sets are publicly available? I would bet close to zero. How many could be retrieved in some fashion and made available? Not many, I think. And this would be far worse as one looks further back in time.

There are, of course, some centralized depositories of social science data (most notably, ICPSR). But IQSS has recently developed a new model of preserving data, which is really around creating an infrastructure (the "Dataverse") to allow decentralized mechanisms for data sharing, and one that I think is "incentive compatible" with getting some credit for creating a public good. (In fact, more should be done to recognize good data, and people who collect good data; again, a story for another day.)

[An addendum to original post, the network workbench initiative offers another bottom up type of model to save network data, via wiki.]

The remainder of this post is excerpted from an e-mail from Gary King, describing the project:

For those who have collected research data and made it available to others, its nice when people thank you. But it would be nicer to receive formal scholarly citation credit and web visibility for your hard work. The Dataverse Network project is designed to get you that credit and visibility.

The idea is to give you a free "dataverse" (your view of the universe of data) -- which is a virtual archive where you can store, permanently preserve, and distribute your data (or list data from other dataverses) with everyone or only those you approve. Your dataverse is branded as yours, with the look and feel of your web site and on your web site, but since it is served out by an installation of the Dataverse Network at Harvard you needn't install any software or hardware. Some other features include:

* Safe and permanent data storage in preservation format branded
as yours.
* No need to translate data when statistical software formats change.
* Can be easily re-branded if you move institutions, but either way
will never be lost.
* Formal citation credit for your data, including a globally unique
identifier and universal numeric fingerprint.
* Establish an unbreakable link between your data and related
published work.
* Easy ways for others to find your data and associated scholarship.
* Share your data with everyone, or those who sign your licensing
agreement, or only individuals or groups you approve.
* Allow users to subset, recode, and download your data in any format
* Run many advanced statistical methods via a GUI on-line.

An interesting but under-appreciated fact is that if you are at an institution that receives federal funding, and you share research data or put it on your web site without prior IRB approval, you are violating federal regulations. (This includes any research data, even that compiled from information in the public domain, from IRB-approved research protocols, or from any other source.) To avoid this problem, the Dataverse Network has automated the IRB data approval process, and so if you have a dataverse in most cases going to the IRB is unnecessary.

For an example, go to my homepage at http://gking.harvard.edu and click on dataverse. To get your own dataverse, go to the IQSS Dataverse Network, http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu. For more information on our open source Dataverse Network project, see http://TheData.org.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:09 PM | Permalink

A follow-up on my previous entry: Thanks to some very attentive folks I noticed that it's rather cumbersome to access our paper from the publisher's website, so now you can download a copy here.

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 2:11 PM | Permalink

Ines Mergel, David Lazer and I have a paper out in the International Journal of Learning and Change on voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Based on data from our study of forensic scientists in government crime labs, we investigated why individuals make the time and effort to answer questions directed at them. In a multi-level framework we identify several influencing factors at the individual, relational, group, and informational level. Here's the abstract:

Knowledge is essential for the functioning of every social system, especially for professionals in knowledge-intensive organisations. Since individuals do not possess all the work-related knowledge that they require, they turn to others in search for that knowledge. While prior research has mainly focused on antecedents and consequences of knowledge sharing and understanding why people do not share knowledge, less is known why people provide knowledge, and what conditions trigger voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Our article addresses this gap by proposing a multi-level framework for voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing: individual, relational, group, and informational. We provide illustrations from a particular knowledge-intensive community, DNA forensic scientists who work at public laboratories.

A pdf version is available from the Inderscience website. Please contact me directly if you'd like a copy and have difficulty accessing the online pdf version.

Posted by Maria Binz-Scharf at 12:49 PM | Permalink

This is a rather clever diffusion experiment, courtesy Matthieu Latapy. If you have a website, you can participate-- you just need to click "spread it" below, enter your url, retrieve the code that will put the image you see below on your website (please, no trackbacks here or to Latapy's website, btw).

FYI, the image you see is the diffusion path of the code, which should change as it spreads.

Posted by David Lazer at 12:39 PM | Permalink

It is my pleasure to announce that "Citizen Relationship Management - A Study of CRM in Government" is now available. Just follow the link to Peter Lang Publishing Group.

Here is a brief description of the book:

This study explores Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in government. Based on an interdisciplinary literature review and multiple-case study design, a model of Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM) is developed and discussed. The case studies explore the perceptions of CRM/CiRM by administrators, elected officials and consultants as well as its implementation and impact on the municipal level and in a multijurisdictional environment in the United States. Although the explorative part of the study focuses broadly on a theoretical conceptualization of CiRM, the immediate empirical referent of research are the 311 initiatives in the City of Baltimore, the City of Chicago, the City of New York and Miami-Dade County. Thus, the results help administrators and researchers to convey the idea and challenges of 311 well. The study shows that CRM is to a certain extent only partly able to make novel contributions to currently active reform movements in government. In addition, the study's findings support the idea that CiRM provides the means to a different kind of public participation.

Contents:
From Customer Relationship Management towards citizen oriented government - CRM - New Public Management - TQM - eGovernment - Citizen public administration relationship - Citizen as customer - Administrative contacting as public participation - Case Studies: CiRM and 311 in Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, Miami-Dade County (Implementation, Understanding, Impact) - Comparing CRM with TQM and eGovernment - A model of Citizen Relationship Management - CiRM and public participation.

I will try to keep you updated on trends in CRM in government on my blog on Citizen Relationship Management.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A quick note to say that the NIPS conference seemed to hit a nerve. When the incipient organizing committee discussed this last August, we were originally envisioning a conference/workshop of 30. Instead, we had 200 attendees, 3 parallel sessions with 40 presentations, 80 posters, and 2 days of packed workshops. There were papers representing the full, diverse, spectrum of political science. In the plenary discussion afterwards there was a clear consensus that this should not be a one-off, but that further steps should be taken in terms of facilitating the entry of network methods into the field. These steps include exploring holding another conference next year, methods workshops at APSA, creating an organized section within APSA, creating a listserv, and creating a paper archive. I would be interested in hearing reactions from the broader interested community in thoughts as to what should/should not be done—feel free to express as comments in the blog.

Posted by David Lazer at 9:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This call for papers might be of interest to some of the readers of this blog:

Special Issue of Journal of Product Innovation Management: “Agent based modeling of innovation diffusion”

Guest Editors: Rosanna Garcia, Northeastern University and Wander Jager, University of Groningen.

Research interest has risen in capturing complexities using ABM to model innovation diffusion, consumer/organizational behavior and marketplace incongruences. Whereas early ABM models were quite abstract, recent developments focus on using empirical data in combination with ABM in addressing key questions in studying innovation diffusion in complex systems: how can we describe, understand, predict and manage complex behaving markets. The main objective of this special issue is to advance our understanding of the social and environmental dynamics that drive processes of innovation diffusion in different market contexts, as well as developing a perspective on the management of the complex dynamics displayed by many of these systems.

Topics will focus on, but are not limited to:

* ABMs of innovation diffusion, market dynamics and consumer/organizational behavior,
* ABMs to model management of innovation diffusion (as opposed to the diffusion process itself) either within an organization or within the consumer marketplace,
* Validation and calibration methods (e.g., conjoint analysis) of ABM’s using empirical data at the micro level (consumers) and macro level (e.g., sales),
* Advancements of the understanding of the role of normative influences and viral marketing (networks) on the diffusion process.

Manuscripts must be based on original work and not under consideration by any other journal or publication outlet. We encourage work that uses agent based models in combination with empirical data. However, conceptual and analytic work is also being considered. All submissions will be subject to double blind review by experts in the field.

For journal information and how to prepare the manuscript, please access the Journal of Product Innovation Management’s homepage and read the Author Guidelines at http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/submit.asp?ref=0737-6782&site=1

The deadline for submission is 15 September 2008. The Special Issue is scheduled to be published in 2009. The deadline for submitting a paper proposal (1000 words) is May 15, 2008. Invitations for submitting a full paper will be sent on October 31, 2008. The deadline for full papers is on January 31, 2009. Submissions should be sent as pdf or word file to w.jager@rug.nl or r.garcia@neu.edu.

Posted by David Lazer at 8:35 AM | Permalink

For those of you with Excel 2007 and Vista, Microsoft has a rather neat add-in tool that you can download for network visualization, .NetMap. Intriguingly, it includes functionality so that you can convert your e-mail inbox into network data, which you can then visualize. The following is an example of a network image generated from a particular day of e-mail exchanges:

Posted by David Lazer at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just realized that I had not posted that the program for the Networks in Political Science (NIPS) conference at Harvard is up. This has turned out to be a rather larger affair than we originally envisioned: between the presentations and posters, there will be over 100 papers, plus two days of methods workshops before. Online registration, etc, information is available through the website.

Posted by David Lazer at 9:14 PM | Permalink

As I have argued previously on this blog, social science is undergoing a paradigm shift, based on the availability (and purposeful creation) of large scale, high granularity, data sets on human behavior. Let me point now to the videos now available from the Conference on Computational Social Science that was hosted by IQSS that Sandy Pentland and I co-chaired last December. To recapitulate, this conference brought together a wide array of folks from the academy to talk about emerging areas of research at the intersection of computer and social sciences. This was a terrific event, and one I hope that I hope in coming years will be pointed to as having helped crystallize discussion about this area. Lots of great moments here, from Roy’s examination of the video records of the first two years of his son’s life, to Christakis’ presentation on the spread of obesity, to Contractor’s examination of virtual worlds. We also had a panel on the tough privacy and human subjects issues that this research poses (perhaps the key hurdle this area wrestle with at this stage), with presentations by the heads of the IRBs at Harvard and MIT, and discussions by Van Alstyne on handling e-mail data, and by Gutmann on handling geocoded data.

Posted by David Lazer at 8:16 AM | Permalink

For anyone who attended the talk today on Intellipedia by Sean Dennehy and Don Burke, you can post reactions on the blog....

"From the Bottom-up: Building the 21st Century CIA"

Sean Dennehy
Chief of the CIA Intellipedia Development Cell

Don Burke
Intellipedia Doyen

Abstract: In this seminar, Sean Dennehy and Don Burke will brief the technical and cultural changes underway at the CIA involving the adoption of wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking tools. These tools are being used to improve information sharing across the US Intelligence Community by moving information out of traditional channels. Sean and Don will also host a question and answer session. In 2005, Dr. Calvin Andrus published “The Wiki and The Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community.” Three years later, a vibrant and rapidly growing community has transformed how the CIA aggregates, communicates, and organizes intelligence information.

Sean Dennehy has more than 15 years of experience in various elements of the US Intelligence Community, including the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, DIA’s Joint Staff Intelligence, and supporting US Air Force operations. As the pilot customer for Intellipedia, he has become a leading change agent for incorporating Enterprise 2.0 solutions into the Intelligence Community's business practices. He has developed an innovative “sabbatical” program that introduces Intelligence Community officers to the numerous web 2.0 applications that are being deployed on multiple intelligence networks. The focus of his efforts is encouraging a viral adoption where officers replace existing processes to take advantage of network effects encountered when individuals move projects out of “channels” and onto “platforms”. His actions are based on the National Intelligence Strategy’s six main characteristics: results-focused, collaborative, bold, future-oriented, self-evaluating, and innovative. Together with a small cadre of early adopters, Mr. Dennehy is helping to break down stovepipes to allow intelligence professionals to truly act as a "community”.

Don Burke is a leading proponent of the Enterprise 2.0 ethos within the Intelligence Community and is currently the "Intellipedia Doyen", which is a role he has held since the spring of 2006. In this role he is partnered with other early adopters in an effort to demonstrate the value of social software tools, educate the Community on how to use these tools, and advocate for improvements to the environment with the goal of improving our ability to capture our knowledge and expertise. Mr. Burke is currently employed by the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology and has a diverse 19+ year background in the Federal Government working a wide range of technical and analytical issues including collection, technical analysis, congressionally directed actions, direct support to operations, project management, advanced visualization technologies, software development, budgeting, and management. Mr. Burke was quoted extensively in the October 2007 SIGNAL magazine article "Intellipedia Seeks Ultimate Information Sharing."

Relevant Readings:

1. NY Times Article (good for general introduction to IC cultural and technological issues)
URL:
2. 2004 - Seminal Paper about why the IC needs to adopt social software technologies
Title: The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community
3. Wikipedia article on "Intellipedia"

_____________________

Posted by David Lazer at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Of potential interest to readers of this blog:

The Virginia Tech Symposium on Enhancing Resilience To Catastrophic Events Through Communicative Planning

Introduction

The Institute for Policy and Governance and the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech invite scholars to consider how collaborative planning can enhance resilience to events that threaten to overcome the social and ecological integrity of communities, states, and societies. Presentations and discussion will be held in Blacksburg, VA on November 16-18, 2008, and symposium papers will be edited and revised for journal and/or book publication in early 2009.

Description and Call For Papers

In an essay entitled "The Resilient Community", Virginia Tech Planning Professor Paul Knox (2007) suggested that the widely-admired response of the university to the April 16th 2007 campus shootings was grounded in affective bonds and close-knit social networks that instill community spirit. The bedrock of Virginia Tech’s common identity and shared purpose, Knox suggested, was collaborative interaction that challenges assumptions, stretches the imagination, and develops self-awareness, as students and faculty interact in ways that remake their inner selves, social selves, and professional selves.

Over the past year, planning scholars at Virginia Tech have been considering how collaboration might enhance resilience not only in intentional communities like universities but also within neighborhoods, states, and societies. We wish to extend this arena of scholarly interest and compelling social need by inviting speakers to Blacksburg to consider how collaboration can enhance resilience to disruptions that can occur across a spectrum of time, space, and organizational complexity, from unforeseen violence to disasters like hurricane Katrina to the biospheric catastrophe of rapid anthropogenic climate change.

Resilience is a potent interdisciplinary systems metaphor whose origins lie in the Latin word "resilíre", meaning "to leap back." Hazard planners, security analysts, and others have deployed the term to describe efforts to restore and maintain an optimal stable condition. A more promising approach for our purposes defines resilience as an interactive product of an unsettling event and a social and biophysical system that can exist in multiple stable states, at scales that may encompass communities, states, or societies. These systems may stabilize, change, or collapse when their integrity is compromised by an event that could be rapid and discrete and irreversible like a terrorist attack, gradual and insidious like climate change, or incremental and spatially heterogeneous like a drought. Resilience is the capacity to withstand loss and recover, to weather disturbance without dramatic loss of identity or structural or functional complexity.

We seek to understand how communicative planning can enhance resilience and how resilience thinking can expand the domain of communicative action. Communicative planners have shown how careful listening and interpretation can accommodate differences in styles of speech, forms of knowledge, and styles of reasoning to promote social learning and yield agreements that are both creative and equitable. Communicative planning scholarship has lately joined in defining emergent forms of collaborative governance, and enlarging its scope from stakeholder-based processes to a diversity of collaborative approaches that can bring to life new discursive frameworks and worldviews that over time can shape institutions, such as regional civic roundtables (Innes and Rongerude 2006) and community reconciliation processes (Sandercock 2003).

We invite interested individuals to submit abstracts that respond to three areas of inquiry:

1. What can collaborative processes contribute toward resilience?

Do collaborative processes create or enhance awareness of resilience dynamics, such as the presence of regime change thresholds, or the possibility of transformative alternatives? Papers might explore how collaborative processes promote learning and knowing and the rapid diffusion of ideas and innovations, nurture and reproduce expertise and ways of knowing. Papers may also address other capacities beyond knowledge formation, such as how collaborative processes may contribute to passing a threshold into an alternative regime, or help manage a system to withstand shocks and avoid a threshold. Another approach would be to examine how leaders can enhance collaborative capacity to identify mutual interest, forge common identity, or foster shared sense of purpose and will to act.

2. How can we design and conduct collaborative processes to enhance resilience?

The principal application of stakeholder-based collaborative planning processes has been to resolve otherwise-intractable disputes. Are similar design and process guidelines appropriate to enhance resilience, or does the new objective call for a different design and approach? In addition, papers might examine how, and under what conditions, collaborative processes might be associated with other forms of networked governance in order to maintain system continuity and integrity, or reorganize in response to changing conditions when existing ways of governing become untenable.

3. When and under what circumstances can collaborative processes contribute to resilience?

While it may take years to foster collective identity and action through collaboration, events that threaten to overcome system integrity often cannot be anticipated and opportunities to influence system reorganization may be fleeting. Papers might examine how collaborative processes can be situated to address threats that are be rapid and discrete, as well as those that are gradual, insidious, incremental, potentially irreversible, intergenerational, or spatially heterogeneous. In addition, papers might consider the circumstances in which collaboration can enhance generalized resilience capacity, which is associated with diverse organizational forms and ways of knowing, loose connections between self-organizing units, and unimpeded circulation of feedback throughout a system (Walker and Salt 2006).

Key Dates

Abstract deadline 30 April 2008
Notification of acceptance 15 May 2008
Deadline for full papers 1 October 2008
Symposium 16-18 November 2008
Papers Revised for Publication May 2009 (tentatively)

Abstract Submission

Proposals for papers or posters are to be sent by e-mail to resilience@vt.edu.
The body of the e-mail (no attachments please) should contain:

* Title of the proposed paper
* Abstract of less than 300 words, and
* Complete address and professional affiliation of all (co)-author(s).

The deadline for proposals is 30 April 2008.

Financial Support

Travel cost reimbursement will be provided for symposium participants, as well as local transportation, food, and lodging.

Hosts

* Institute for Policy and Governance, Virginia Tech
* School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech

Conference Chair

* Bruce Evan Goldstein, Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech

Advisory Committee

* Max Stephenson, Director, Institute for Policy and Governance, Virginia Tech
* John Randolph, Director, School Policy and International Affairs, Virginia Tech
* R. Bruce Hull, Professor of Forestry, Virginia Tech
* Paul Knox, University Distinguished Professor and Senior Fellow for International Advancement, Virginia Tech

Contact

Bruce Evan Goldstein

Urban Affairs and Planning

103 Architecture Annex

Virginia Tech

Blacksburg, VA 24061

Conference E-mail: resilience@vt.edu
Conference Website: : http://www.ipg.vt.edu/resilience.html

References

Innes, Judith and Jane Rongerude. 2006. "Collaborative Regional Initiatives: Civic Entrepreneurs Work to Fill the Governance Gap ." Working Paper 2006-04. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California at Berkeley.

Knox, Paul. 2007. "The Resilient Community." Planning, June issue.

Sandercock, Leonie. 2003. "Out of the Closet: The Importance of Stories and Storytelling in Planning Practice." Planning Theory and Practice 4(1):11-28.

Walker, Brian and David Salt. 2006. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Posted by David Lazer at 12:09 PM | Permalink

Second Call for Papers / Funding for doctoral student training:

Conference at Harvard on Networks in Political Science (deadline MARCH 1ST)

The study of networks has exploded over the last decade, both in the
social and hard sciences. From sociology to biology, there has been a
paradigm shift from a focus on the units of the system to the
relationships among those units. Despite a tradition incorporating
network ideas dating back at least 70 years, political science has been
largely left out of this recent creative surge. This has begun to change,
as witnessed, for example, by an exponential increase in network-related
research presented at the major disciplinary conferences.

We therefore announce an open call for paper proposals for presentation
at a conference on "Networks in Political Science" (NIPS). We are
soliciting papers that apply network ideas in the fields of
American Politics, International Relations, Comparative Politics,
Political Theory, Public Administration, and Political Methodology.

The conference will take place June 13-14. Preceding the conference on
June 11-12 we will also provide a series of workshops introducing existing
substantive areas of research, statistical methods (and software packages)
for dealing with the distinctive dependencies of network data, and network
visualization. There will be workshops covering UCINET, Netdraw,
exponential random graph models, SIENA, P*, and potentially other
topics as well.

There will be a $50 conference fee, as well as a $20 fee per workshop.

FUNDING IS AVAILABLE TO DEFRAY THE COSTS OF ATTENDANCE FOR DOCTORAL
STUDENTS AND RECENT (post 2005) PhD.'s. Funding may also be available for
graduate students not presenting papers, but preference will be given to
students using network analysis in their dissertations. Women and
minorities are especially encouraged to apply.

The deadline for submitting a paper proposal is March 1, 2008. Proposals
should include a title and a one-paragraph abstract. Graduate students
and recent Ph.D.'s applying for funding should also include their CV, a
letter of support from their advisor, and a brief statement about their
intended use of network analysis. Send them to

networked_governance@ksg.harvard.edu.

NIPS is supported by the National Science Foundation, and sponsored by the
Program on Networked Governance at Harvard University. The final program
will be available at www.ksg.harvard.edu/netgov.

Program Committee: Christopher Ansell (UCBerkeley), James Fowler (UCSD),
Michael Heaney (Florida), David Lazer (Harvard), Scott McClurg (Southern
Illinois), John Padgett (Chicago), John Scholz (Florida State), Sarah
Reckhow (UCBerkeley), Paul Thurner (Mannheim), and Michael Ward
(University of Washington).

Posted by David Lazer at 9:42 AM | Permalink

Really interesting and beautiful visuals of New York City communication with the rest of the world, courtesy of the the Senseable City Laboratory at MIT (based on aggregated telecomm data), will be on display at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC February 24 to May 12. Or you could go this website....

Posted by David Lazer at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I am pleased to announce the Spring, 2008 speakers for the Cambridge Colloquium on Complexity and Social Networks:

Martin Nowak (Harvard) on February 11: Evolutionary dynamics of cooperation.

Asim Khwaja (Harvard) February 25: The value of business networks: evidence from an emerging economy

Robert Goldstone (Indiana) March 3: The hive mind: experiments and models of human collective behavior

Patrick Wolfe and Benjamin Olding (Harvard) April 21: Sampling random networks to discover structure: models and methods

All colloquia will be at noon in the Fainsod room (third floor Littauer building at the Kennedy School). A light lunch will be served.

Posted by David Lazer at 12:58 PM | Permalink

Thanks, David.
I very much looking forward to joining, and hope that I can contribute good and interesting stuff. Your intro was very flattering .... thank you. And I will even own up to having a connection to the institution that sponsors this blog, so I feel a bit like I belong.

My interests are networks in science and business, and I will try to post regularly!

Posted by Stan Wasserman at 4:32 PM | Permalink

It is my distinct pleasure to announce the addition of Stanley Wasserman to the netgov blog. Stanley is not only one of the leading statisticians in the area of social network analysis, but is also possessed of a notably pithy and direct style that is especially well suited for blogging (see his centralityjournal).

Some essential biographical information: Stanley Wasserman is Rudy Professor of Statistics, Psychology, and Sociology in the Departments of Statistics, Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Sociology at Indiana. He is also founding chair of the Department of Statistics. He is the author of numerous articles and books, most notably, coauthor (with Katherine Faust) of the now canonical Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. For more details see his website.