The National Institutes of Health, under the National Library of Medicine’s program on data science research, awarded a $1.55 million grant to an interdisciplinary team lead by Luis Rocha, a professor of informatics, member of CNETS and the director of the NSF-NRT complex networks & systems program at the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. The four-year project, a collaboration between SICE and the Indiana University School of Nursing, will employ innovative data- and network-science methods to produce myAURA, an easy-to-use web service for epilepsy patients. myAURA will be based on a large-scale epilepsy knowledge graph built by integrating data from social media, electronic health records, patient discussion boards, scientific literature databases, advocacy websites, and mobile app data. The knowledge graph will, in turn, be used to fuel recommendation and visualization algorithms based on the automatic inference of relevant associations. The inference will follow algorithms developed by Rocha’s team to remove redundancy and extract factual information from large knowledge graphs as well as parsimonious network visualizations developed by Katy Börner, Distinguished Professor of Engineering & Information Science at SICE. Continue reading CNetS team awarded NIH grant to improve chronic-disease management with Data and Network Science
CNetS grad honored with 2018 University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award
Onur Varol, a postdoctoral research associate at Northeastern University who earned his Ph.D. in Informatics from CNetS, has been honored with the University Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertation Award for 2018, which is the highest honor for research Indiana University bestows on its graduate students. “I am extremely happy to receive this award,” Varol said. “I would like to especially thank my advisor, Filippo Menczer, and the Informatics department for nominating me. I was lucky to be surrounded by the best advisors, collaborators, and research group I could imagine during my doctoral studies, and I am a proud IU alumni and a Hoosier.” Varol’s dissertation, “Analyzing Social Big Data to Study Online Discourse and Its Manipulation,” provided insights into analysis of online conversations and mechanisms used for their manipulation. Varol built machine learning frameworks like Botometer to detect social bots. More…
CNetS grad combats the spread of fake news with new mobile app
The spread of fake news is no game, but to recent CNetS graduate Mihai Avram, a game just might be the solution. As a graduate student in CNetS, Avram developed a mobile app called Fakey to help combat the spread of fake news on social media. It is available to download for both Android and iOS. The news literacy game places users in a simulated social media environment where they can share, “like” or fact-check articles. Users are given feedback for their actions and earn points if they share stories from legitimate news sources, or if they fact-check articles from low-credibility sources. More…
3 new tools to study and counter online disinformation
Researchers at CNetS, IUNI, and the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media have launched upgrades to two tools playing a major role in countering the spread of misinformation online: Hoaxy and Botometer. A third tool Fakey — an educational game designed to make people smarter news consumers — also launches with the upgrades. Continue reading 3 new tools to study and counter online disinformation
The science of fake news
The indictment of 13 Russians in the operation of a “troll farm” that spread false information related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election has renewed the spotlight on the power of “fake news” to influence public opinion. Now, an Indiana University faculty member who studies the spread of misinformation online is joining prominent legal scholars, social scientists and researchers in a global “call to action” in the fight against it. Filippo Menczer, a professor in CNetS and the IU School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, is a co-author of a paper published March 8 in the journal Science that calls for a coordinated investigation into the underlying social, psychological and technological forces behind fake news. This is necessary to counteract the phenomenon’s negative influence on society, the authors said. READ MORE
CNetS in Science
The manifesto of science of science has been published in Science magazine. This is a team effort involving 14 coauthors, three of whom are members of our center: Santo Fortunato (first and corresponding author), Staša Milojević and Filippo Radicchi. The team includes superstars in the field of complex systems like Albert-László Barabási, Dirk Helbing, Alessandro Vespignani, and Brian Uzzi. The paper is a review of the main research topics within science of science: knowledge networks, problem selection, novelty, career dynamics, team science and citation dynamics.
Study finds online interest in sex rises at Christmas, with more births nine months later
First global analysis of human birth-rate cycles reveals that post-holiday ‘baby boom’ persists across cultures, hemispheres. CNetS PhD student Ian Wood and Professors Luis Rocha and Johan Bollen, in collaboration with Joana Sá, used data science and computational social science methods to demonstrate that “Human Sexual Cycles are Driven by Culture and Match Collective Moods.” See full article at IU News and media coverage in many venues such as The Independent, Time, Newsweek, Publico, ScienceDaily, Phys.org, The National Post, DailyMail, The Hindustan Times, Men’s Fitness, Mother Jones, Drive with Yasmeen Khan (at 17:30) (audio of interview), etc. Discussion of the paper was a top trending topic on Reddit. Watch a short video about the research.
OSoMe for all IU researchers
Thanks to support from the Indiana University Network Science Institute (IUNI) and Digital Science Center (DSC), the full content of the Twitter data repository from the Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe) is now available to all IU researchers. Many tools to detect social bots, study the spread of fake news, visualize meme diffusion networks, trends, and maps, as well as APIs to access this data, have been available to the general public since mid-2016. Now, however, the IU research community can access enhanced data and content from the large collection, based on a 10% sample of all public tweets. A dedicated portal allows IU faculty and students to submit queries to the OSoMe cluster based on hashtags, URLs, keywords, geo-coordinates, and other criteria. At any time the system can search and retrieve data from the previous 18 months. We hope this resource will spur and support new research projects in all areas of computing, natural, and social sciences. Click here to read how to get access and learn more about the data, or attend our Open Science Forum!
DARPA grant to study information spread
Fil Menczer, professor of computer science and informatics at the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, is part of a group that has been awarded a $1.2 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to study how and at what rate information spreads in a global information environment. The project, COSINE: Cognitive Online Simulation of Information Network Environments, also involves Professor of Informatics Alessandro Flammini and Assistant Professor of Informatics and Computing YY Ahn. The project is in collaboration with colleagues at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and the University of Notre Dame. Read more…
CNETS professors create complex systems on the dance floor
“On the last Friday of each month, instead of heading home to their families after the weekly School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering faculty meeting, professors Luis Rocha and Johan Bollen head to the Root Cellar Lounge and become DJ E-Trash and DJ Angst. […] Both Bollen and Rocha are considered experts in the field of complex networks and systems, and they agree that when they DJ, they are part of just the kind of complex systems they study”. See full article at IU News.