The Computing Innovation Fellows Project

Posted on: Thursday, May 28th, 2009
Broad Research Area: Graphics / Visualization, HCI / CSCW, Information Systems / Information Science, Numerical/Scientific Computing / HPC / Data-Intensive Scalable Computing, Scientific/Medical Informatics, Social Computing / Social Informatics

Research Interests:

Over the past decade Contractor’s lab (Science of Networks in Communities – SONIC) has examined the forces of technology and globalization that are fundamentally challenging conventional wisdom about organizations and organizing. Contractor’s research has sought to develop the complex tools we need for investigating these new organizational forms and to build the theory we need for understanding them. Contractor’s research offers a rigorous set of methods to better study networked forms of organizing, a multi-theoretical base to better explain them, and a complex suite of models to test them. Continuously funded over the past 15 years by major grants from NSF and other agencies, Contractor’s research is making five contributions:

(1) Developed a multi-theoretical, multi-level (MTML) theoretical framework to study the emergence of networks within communities

(2) Developed agent-based computational modeling techniques (Blanche) that simulate the emergence of networks based on the mechanisms postulated in the multi-theoretical multilevel (MTML) framework

(3) Utilized advanced text-mining, 2D/3D video capture, and web-crawling techniques to harvest longitudinal empirical network data from the increasing amount of actions, interactions, and transactions captured digitally

(4) Contributed to the deployment of advanced (exponential random graph modeling or p*) statistical techniques especially suited to test the multi-theoretical multi-level modeling of emergent network structures in communities

(5) Developed IKNOW and CIKNOW social networking and recommender systems technologies, to help members harness the social and knowledge capital within their communities

Some of the current projects include:

• Emergency Response Communities: In a project funded by NSF, we are collaborating with civil engineers, communication researchers computer scientists, entomologists, and sociologists at Illinois, Carnegie Mellon, and USC to develop more effective and scalable methods to capture, annotate, and analyze, high quantities of high quality multimodal network data on group interactions in emergency response situations.

• Virtual Organizations as Socio-technical Systems: In an NSF funded project, we are collaborating with USC to develop a better understanding of how we assemble effective scientific teams by searching and navigating the varied resources available within multiple cyber-enabled scientific communities such as the nanoHUB.

• Gaming Communities: In a project funded by the NSF and the Army Research Institute, we are collaborating with Illinois, USC, and Minnesota to identify the network dynamics within communities playing massively multiplayer online role-playing (MMORPG) games.

• Public Health Communities: In a project funded by NSF and NIH, we are collaborating with researchers at Indiana, Michigan, and SUNY Buffalo to enhance collaboration in the Tobacco Surveillance, Evaluation and Epidemiology Network (TSEEN).

• Clinical & Translational Science: In a project funded by the NIH, we are developing techniques to map, measure, and modify the existing social and knowledge networks among researchers and practitioners engaged in moving new insights from the “bench” (the laboratory) to the “bedside” (the patient) and back.

• Petascale Applications: In a project funded by the NSF, we are collaborating with VPI to develop computational techniques and algorithms that will enable the use of high performance (petascale) computers to conduct statistical estimation and computational modeling of very large scale networks.

Contact Information:

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217 390 6270 (mobile)
847 491 3669 (work)