The National Science Foundation has awarded nearly $3 million to train future research leaders in Complex Networks and Systems, via the PhD Program established by CNETS faculty. The highly selective grant from the NSF’s Research Traineeship Award will create a dual Ph.D. program at Indiana University to train graduate students to be proficient in both a specific discipline, such as psychology or political science, as well as network, complexity and data science. The new Ph.D. program will also leverage the strengths of the Indiana Network Science Institute, or IUNI, to involve students in interdisciplinary research.”The biggest challenges currently faced by society require large teams of people who are ‘fluent’ in more than one scientific discipline,” said Luis Rocha, CNETS professor in the IU School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering who will lead the new program. “But the current education model in academia is still largely focused on training researchers who know how to set up independent labs with agendas driven by a single person. If we want to take on the really big problems, we’ve got to create more scientists with deep expertise in multiple areas.” Full Press Release Available.
Tag Archives: NSF
David Crandall’s Career Award
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…
NSF award to fund research on the social Web
Fil Menczer recently received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the Social Integration of Semantic Annotation Networks for Web Applications. The project brings together complex networks and Web mining techniques to develop a new generation of search engines and collaborative Web applications such as GiveALink.org. The researchers will leverage existing annotations from users (such as the bookmarks they already maintain on their browsers) and elicit new ones through useful tools and games. The research will lead to a framework for building and maintaining socio-semantic networks of relationships between, and among, users, tags, and Web sites. In the end, these networks will improve social Web applications such as search, recommendation, spam detection, and exploratory navigation interfaces. More…