Kinsey Reporter App

UPDATE: With legal review completed, we re-launched Kinsey Reporter V.2!

CNetS, in collaboration with The Kinsey Institute, has released Kinsey Reporter, a global mobile survey platform for collecting and sharing anonymous data about sexual and other intimate behaviors. The pilot project allows citizen observers around the world to use free applications now available for Apple and Android mobile platforms to not only report on sexual behavior and experiences, but also to share, explore and visualize the accumulated data.

This new platform will allow us to explore issues that have been challenging to study until now, such as the prevalence of unreported sexual violence in different parts of the world, or the correlation between various sexual practices like condom use, for example, and the cultural, political, religious or health contexts in particular geographical areas.

The Kinsey Institute’s longstanding seminal studies of sexual behaviors created a perfect synergy with research going on at CNetS related to mining big data crowd-sourced from mobile social media. The sensitive domain — sexual relations — added an intriguing challenge in finding a way to share useful data with the community while protecting the privacy and anonymity of the reporting volunteers.

Apps are available for free download at both the Apple iOS and Android app stores — download yours now! (More from IU News Room…)

David Crandall

Congratulations to David Crandall for his NSF CAREER Award! The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.  David’s project Observing the world through the lenses of social media will lay the foundation for using visual social media as a new source of observational data for a variety of scientific disciplines by investigating the algorithms and technologies needed for mining large collections of photographs and noisy metadata to draw inferences about the physical world. “Every day, millions of people across the world take photos and upload them to social media websites,” David observes. “Their goal is to share photos with friends and others, but collectively they are creating vast repositories of visual information about the world and how it looked across time and space. Aggregated together, these photos could provide new sources of observational data for use in disciplines like biology, earth science, social science or history.” More…

Dynamical Modularity

Read our latest paper titled Canalization and Control in Automata Networks: Body Segmentation in Drosophila melanogaster in PLoS ONE. Authors Manuel Marques-Pita & Luis Rocha ask, How do cells and tissues ‘compute’? Schema redescription is presented as a methodology to characterize canalization in automata networks used to model biochemical regulation and signalling. Canalization becomes synonymous with redundancy present in the logic of automata. This results in straightforward measures to quantify canalization in an automaton (micro-level), which is in turn integrated into a highly scalable framework to characterize the collective dynamics of large-scale automata networks (macro-level). Several new results ensue from this methodology developed as part of the CASCI collective dynamics project: uncovering of dynamical modularity (modules in the dynamics rather than in the structure of networks), identification of minimal conditions and critical nodes to control the convergence to attractors, simulation of dynamical behaviour from incomplete information about initial conditions, and measures of macro-level canalization and robustness to perturbations. The methodology is applicable to any complex network that can be modelled using automata, but this work focuses on biochemical regulation and signalling, with a well-known model of the intra- and inter cellular genetic regulation of body segmentation in Drosophila melanogaster.

The project “Social SLAM: Creating Dynamical Socio-Environmental Models for Mobile Robots”, a collaboration between Luis Rocha, Selma Sabanovic, Matt Francisco, and Alin Cosmanescu, has received an IUCRG grant for 2013-2014 from the Office of the Vice President for Research at Indiana University.

The pharmacokinetics ontology and corpus for text mining developed in collaboration with Li’s lab at IUPUI, part of CASCI Biomedical Literature Mining work, has been reported in BMC Bioinformatics where it has become a Highly Accessed paper:

Wu, Hengyi, S. Karnik, A. Subhadarshini, Z. Wang, S. Philips, X. Han, C. Chiang, L. Liu, M. Boustani, L.M. Rocha, S.K. Quinney, D.A. Flockhart and L. Li [2013]. “An Integrated Pharmacokinetics Ontology and Corpus for Text Mining”. BMC Bioinformatics. 14:35. DOI:10.1186/1471-2105-14-35.

IU Click Collection System

To foster the study of the structure and dynamics of Web traffic networks, we are making available to the research community a large Click Dataset of 13 53.5 billion HTTP requests collected at Indiana University. Between 2006 and 2010, our system generated data at a rate of about 60 million requests per day, or about 30 GB/day of raw data. We hope that this data will help develop a better understanding of user behavior online and create more realistic models of Web traffic. The potential applications of this data include improved designs for networks, sites, and server software; more accurate forecasting of traffic trends; classification of sites based on the patterns of activity they inspire; and improved ranking algorithms for search results.

Read our latest paper titled Social Dynamics of Science in Nature Scientific Reports. Authors Xiaoling Sun, Jasleen Kaur, Staša Milojević, Alessandro Flammini & Filippo Menczer ask, How do scientific disciplines emerge? No quantitative model to date allows us to validate competing theories on the different roles of endogenous processes, such as social collaborations, and exogenous events, such as scientific discoveries. Here we propose an agent-based model in which the evolution of disciplines is guided mainly by social interactions among agents representing scientists. Disciplines emerge from splitting and merging of social communities in a collaboration network. We find that this social model can account for a number of stylized facts about the relationships between disciplines, scholars, and publications. These results provide strong quantitative support for the key role of social interactions in shaping the dynamics of science. While several “science of science” theories exist, this is the first account for the emergence of disciplines that is validated on the basis of empirical data.

[UPDATE: this position has been filled.]

The Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research has an open postdoctoral position to study how ideas propagate through complex online social networks. The position is funded by a McDonnell Foundation’s grant in Complex Systems. The appointment starts as early as possible after January 2013 for one year and is renewable for up to 2 additional years. The salary is competitive and benefits are generous.

The postdoc will join a dynamic and interdisciplinary team that includes computer, physical, and cognitive scientists. The postdoc will work with PIs Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini, other postdocs, and several PhD students on analysis and modeling of social media data. Areas of focus will include information diffusion patterns, epidemic models for the spread of ideas, interactions between network traffic and structure dynamics, and agent-based models to explain the emergence of viral bursts of attention. Domains of study will include politics, scientific knowledge, and world events. Go to the grant page or project page for further details on the team and project.

The ideal candidate will have a PhD in computing or physical sciences; a strong background in analysis and modeling of complex systems and networks; and solid programming skills necessary to handle big data and develop large scale simulations.

To apply, email/send a CV and names and emails of three references to Tara Holbrook. Applications received by 15 December 2012 will receive full consideration, but applications will be considered until the position is filled.

Indiana University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. Applications from women and minorities are strongly encouraged. IU Bloomington is vitally interested in the needs of Dual Career couples.

Thanks to KDnuggets, SOCNET, Gephi, DBWorld, Air-L, CITASA and others for help in advertising this position.

Research by our Truthy team was recently featured in New Scientist, USA Today, and the cover story of Science News. The Truthy project, developed by CNetS researchers and doctoral students, aims to study the factors affecting the spread of information — and misinformation — in social media.

The Truthy site charts tweet sentiment and volume related to themes such as social movements and news. It also monitors Twitter  activity to build interactive networks that let visitors visualize the diffusion networks of memes, identify the most influential information spreaders, and explore those influential  feeds and other information about their online activity, such as sentiment and language. Other tools let you map the geo-temporal diffusion of memes, generate YouTube movies that display how hashtags emerge and connect, and download data directly from Twitter. With these analytics, one can begin to ask question such as: How does sentiment change in response to events and memes? What memes survive over time? Who are the most influential users on a particular topic?

For more press coverage go to the Truthy press page.

We welcome the Web Science Lab to our center! This underscores our ongoing collaborations in the emerging discipline of Web Science. Since February 2012, CNetS is a member of WSTNet, an international network bringing together world-class research laboratories to support the Web Science research and education program. The Web Science Network of Laboratories combines some of the world’s leading academic researchers in Web Science, with  academic programs that enhance the already growing influence of Web Science. The member labs, from institutions that also include USC, MIT, Northwestern, Oxford, and Southampton among others, provide valuable support for the ongoing development of Web Science. Contributions from the labs include the organization and hosting of summer schools, workshops and meetings, including the WebSci conference series.