CNetS students, postdocs, and faculty members will be presenting 12 papers, 7 posters, and a tutorial on OSoMe tools at the 2000 International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), held online this year due to COVID-19. In addition, Fil Menczer will deliver one of the keynotes. Continue reading CNetS @ IC2S2
Tag Archives: computational social science
CNetS researchers map global economy
A team of CNetS researchers has created the first global map of labor flow in collaboration with the world’s largest professional social network, LinkedIn. The work is reported in the journal Nature Communications. The study’s lead authors are Jaehyuk Park and Ian Wood, PhD students working with YY Ahn. Wood is currently a software engineer at LinkedIn. Other authors on the study are CNetS PhD student Elise Jing; Azadeh Nematzadeh of S&P Global, who contributed to the study as a CNetS PhD student; Souvik Ghosh of LinkedIn; and Michael Conover, a CNetS PhD graduate and senior data scientist at LinkedIn at the time of the study. CNetS researchers created the map using LinkedIn’s data on 500 million people between 1990 and 2015, including about 130 million job transitions between more than 4 million companies. The researchers gained access to this data as one of only two teams — IU and MIT — selected to continue their work on the LinkedIn Economic Graph Research program beyond 2017. The study’s result represents a powerful tool for understanding the flow of people between industries and regions in the U.S. and beyond. It could also help policymakers better understand how to address critical skill gaps in the labor market or connect workers with new opportunities in nearby communities. More…
Congrats Dr. Clayton Davis!
Congratulations to Clayton A. Davis, who successfully defended his PhD dissertation titled “Collect, Count, and Compare”: Expanding Access and Scope of Social Media Analysis. Dr. Davis’ work explored ways to facilitate research using massive social data through tools that are friendly for non-technical users, robust to manipulation by social bots, and that offer strict anonymity guarantees. His work has been featured on the cover of Communications of the ACM and quoted in top worldwide media venues. Web interfaces for his projects, including Botometer, Kinsey Reporter, and the Observatory on Social Media, have served millions of queries to thousands of Internet users. Davis has also made key pedagogical contributions, and co-authored a textbook on network science to be published later this year by Cambridge University Press.
CNetS article wins PNAS Cozzarelli prize
Alexander T. J. Barron, a PhD candidate in CNetS, and co-authors are recipients of the 2018 Cozzarelli Prize in Behavioral and Social Sciences for their paper, Individuals, institutions, and innovation in the debates of the French Revolution. Every year, six of these awards are given to PNAS publications according to their “outstanding scientific quality and originality.” Each of the papers selected were chosen from the more than 3,200 research articles that appeared in PNAS during the last year and represent the six broadly defined classes under which the National Academy of Sciences is organized. The paper is the product of an interdisciplinary research team across several universities: Alexander Barron (Informatics, IU), Simon DeDeo (Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon and the Santa Fe Institute), Rebecca Spang (History, IU), and Jenny Huang (soon to be attending Oxford).
Continue reading CNetS article wins PNAS Cozzarelli prizeStudy 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!
New Ph.D. Graduate
Congratulations to Onur Varol for successfully defending his dissertation entitled “Analyzing Social Big Data to Study Online Discourse and its Manipulation” on April 25th 2017, supervised by Filippo Menczer. Onur completed a PhD degree in the Complex Systems track of the Informatics PhD Program. Onur has accepted a postdoctoral position at Northeastern University at the Center for Complex Network Research.
ICWSM 2017 Workshop on Digital Misinformation
Update: workshop report available (AI Magazine Spring 2018 | DOI:10.1609/aimag.v39i1.2783 | Preprint)
The deluge of online and offline misinformation is overloading the exchange of ideas upon which democracies depend. Many have argued that echo chambers are increasingly constricting the ability of alternative perspectives to provide a check on one’
s viewpoints. Suffering fragmentation and declining public trust, the Fourth Estate struggles to carry out its traditional editorial role distinguishing facts from fiction. Without those safeguards, fake news, conspiracy theories, and deceptive social bots proliferate, facilitating the manipulation of public opinion. Countering misinformation while protecting freedom of speech will require collaboration between stakeholders across industry, journalism, and academia. To foster such collaboration, the Workshop on Digital Misinformation will be held in conjunction with the 2017 International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) in Montreal, on May 15, 2017. Continue reading ICWSM 2017 Workshop on Digital Misinformation
The Social Network of Healthcare – How Instagram and Twitter are Providing New Insights
Sponsored by Persistent Systems. Luis Rocha, Director of the Complex Systems PhD track in the School of Information and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington, explains the new software-driven approach to medical research. Big data generated through social media such as Twitter and Instragram provides a far deeper and fuller examination of the impact of medicines and diseases, leading to greater actionable insights to improve the efficacy of prevention and treatment.
OSoMe tools to analyze online trends, memes
Did more people see #thedress as blue and black or white and gold? How many Twitter users wanted pop star Katy Perry to take the #icebucketchallenge? The power to explore online social media movements — from the pop cultural to the political — with the same algorithmic sophistication as top experts in the field is now available to journalists, researchers and members of the public from a free, user-friendly online software suite released today by scientists at Indiana University. The Web-based tools, called the Observatory on Social Media, or “OSoMe” (pronounced “awesome”), provide anyone with an Internet connection the power to analyze online trends, memes and other online bursts of viral activity. An academic pre-print paper on the tools is available in the open-access journal PeerJ.
“This software and data mark a major goal in our work on Internet memes and trends over the past six years,” said Filippo Menczer, director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and a professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing. “We are beginning to learn how information spreads in social networks, what causes a meme to go viral and what factors affect the long-term survival of misinformation online. The observatory provides an easy way to access these insights from a large, multi-year dataset.” Read more.