Newsletter August 2009 In this issue: Editorial | Events | Spotlights | News | Conferences | Funding | Groups | Jobs EDITORIAL Welcome to the August issue of the CTSB newsletter! Our faculty spotlight is Professor and CTSB affiliate Eszter Hargittai (Communication). Our featured student is Ph.D. graduate student David Huffaker (Media, Technology and Society) and the project spotlight is Immigrant Youth and Transnational Literacy by Eva Lam (School of Education and Social Policy). I hope you all will join us for our last summer TCIF lunch on Friday, August 7th. Thank you for reading this issue and we look forward to seeing you! - Christopher Riesbeck (Acting Director, CTSB) and Lindsey Lumley (Newsletter Editor, CTSB) EVENTS Upcoming CTSB events to mark in your calendar: Thank CTSB It's Friday! The August TCIF event will be held on Friday, August 7, 2009 in Frances Searle, room 2-431. Please join us for lunch and engaging conversation. If you have specific ideas of activities you would like to see or showcase at TCIF this summer or next fall quarter, please contact Lindsey Lumley at l-lumley@northwestern.edu. SPOTLIGHTS Faculty Spotlight: Eszter Hargittai Eszter Hargittai is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use Project. She is also Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University where she was a Wilson Scholar. In 2006/07 she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Her research focuses on the social and policy implications of information technologies with a particular interest in how IT may contribute to or alleviate social inequalities. Her academic work, among other things, looks at how differences in people's Web-use skills relate to different types of Internet uses and online engagement. Current research projects include a look at how users assess the credibility of online content, a typology of social network site usage, the participation divide in Internet use, gender differences in online engagement, and how digital media uses relate to political participation. She is also continuing to develop a new method of collecting time-diary data through text-messaging. She is editor of the forthcoming book Research Confidential, which presents a rare behind-the-scenes look at doing empirical social science research. Her academic papers have won several prizes, including two this past year. Her work is regularly featured in the media including live TV and radio appearances as well as coverage in such venues as the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today and magazines such as Women's Health and Cosmopolitan. Her recent work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Nokia Research and the Hiatt Fund of Northwestern's School of Communication. She was just recently notified about having received a Google Research Award for a study on health-information seeking online. She's been blogging at Eszter's Blog since 2002 and posting tweets at http://www.twitter.com/eszter since 2006. Student Spotlight: David Huffaker David Huffaker (M.A., Georgetown University) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Media, Technology and Society program in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. His teaching and research focus on issues pertaining to technology and social behavior. In particular, he examines leadership, expertise, collaboration and learning in online settings. His work stands at the intersection of Communication Studies, Psychology, Organizational Science and Technology Studies. He has published in leading journals such as Developmental Psychology, Applied Developmental Psychology and Journal of Educational Computing Research. His research has been highlighted on CBS, NBC, BBC, USA Today, New Scientist and Science News among others. Trained in interdisciplinary quantitative and qualitative approaches, David relies on language analysis (including automated text analysis and hand-coded discourse analysis) and social network analysis to examine the communication patterns of online users in large-scale networks. His dissertation examines dimensions of leadership and social influence in online communities. His advisors are Daniel Diermeier in the Kellogg School of Management and Noshir Contractor in the School of Communication. His dissertation committee also includes Eszter Hargittai and Darren Gergle. Previously, David was advised by Justine Cassell, director of the Articulab (2004-2007), and Sandra Calvert, director of the Children's Digital Media Center (2002-2004). He was also a summer intern at the I.B.M. T.J. Watson Research Center, working with Jennifer Lai in the Adaptive Learning Solutions Group (2006). Prior to his doctoral work, he completed a M.A. in Communication, Culture and Technology at Georgetown University. In addition, David is interested in the design and implementation of new technologies. He has over twelve years experience as a web developer and graphic designer, and has worked with many Fortune 500 companies. Research Spotlight: Immigrant Youth and Transnational Literacy In a current research project, Dr. Eva Lam (School of Education and Social Policy) and a team of graduate and undergraduate students are investigating the digital literacy practices of immigrant youth across transnational contexts. While the Internet has been conceived as a global technology that provides social and information linkages across geographical space, little educational research to date has examined the technoliteracy practices that young people of migrant backgrounds use to develop and maintain social relationships and affiliations across countries. This project uses focus group interviews and in-depth ethnographic observation, video and electronic documentation to investigate how immigrant teens use the Internet to organize social relationships, and access and produce information and media content across countries. The papers that are developed from the study consider issues of translocal multilingualism, social capital and cultural affiliations across national borders. Faculty & Student News Roundup Noshir Contractor (Communication) is an Invited Fellow in the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Nicole Immorlica (EECS) has been appointed a Microsoft Research Fellow for 2009. Lance Fortnow (EECS) shared his opinion in Communications of the ACM in an article called, "Time for Computer Science to Grow Up." Pablo Boczkowski (Communication) wrote "Newspaper culture and technical innovation: American newspapers approach their digital future, 1980 -- 2005," which will appear in Media, technology and society: The challenges of digital convergence this fall. Peter Dinda (EECS), Bin Lin, Arindam Mallik, Gokhan Memik, and Robert Dick presented their paper entitled "User- and Process-driven Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling" at the Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS 2009) in April. Ian Horswill (EECS) wrote "Very Fast Action Selection for Parameterized Behavior," which he presented in the Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games(FDG-09) in Orlando, FL in April 2009. Funding Opportunities Note: the following list is not exhaustive. You can help by alerting us to relevant opportunities. NSF Alan T. Waterman Award Congress established the Alan T. Waterman Award in August 1975 to mark the 25th Anniversary of the National Science Foundation and to honor its first Director. The annual award recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering supported by the National Science Foundation. In addition to a medal, the awardee receives a grant of $500,000 over a three year period for scientific research or advanced study in the mathematical, physical, biological, engineering, social, or other sciences at the institution of the recipient's choice. Candidates must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents and must be 35 years of age or younger or not more than 7 years beyond receipt of the Ph.D. degree by December 31 of the year in which they are nominated. Submissions are due December 5, 2009. Organization for Autism Research The Organization for Autism Research (OAR) seeks applied research proposals for its 2010 Autism Applied Research Competition. Through this competition, OAR intends to promote evidence based practices delivered from research in the following areas: the analysis, evaluation, or comparison of current models of assessment, intervention, or systems of service delivery including policy analysis; applied aspects of educational, behavioral, or social/communicative intervention across the lifespan; adult issues such as continuing education, employment, residential supports, sexuality instruction, quality-of-life determinants, and "later intervention"; and issues related to family support, social and community integration, assessment and intervention with challenging behavior, and the use of technology in support of learners with ASD. OAR seeks to fund studies of one to two years in length that will likely produce practical and clearly objective results that promise some direct benefit for learners with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), their families, and related service providers (e.g., teachers, classroom aides, job coaches, speech pathologists, psychologists, etc.) at different times in their lives. Proposal deadline is April 2, 2010. ACM-W Scholarships for Attendance at Research Conferences ACM-W provides support for women students in Computer Science and related programs (at the undergraduate or graduate levels) who wish to attend research conferences. Exposure to the CS research world can be an important factor in encouraging a student to continue on to the next level (undergraduate to graduate, Masters to Ph.D., Ph.D. to an industry or academic position). The student does not have to present a paper at the conference she attends. In cases of exceptional demonstrable interest in pursuing study and research in CS, high school students will also be considered for conference support. Twenty such scholarships, of up to $500 each, will be awarded annually. ACM-W also encourages the student's home department to match the scholarship award and recognize the student's achievement locally within their department. In addition, if the award is for attendance at one of several ACM special interest group conferences (SIGCSE, SIGARCH, SIGSOFT, SIGCOMM, SIGECOM, SIGGRAPH, SIGPLAN, and SIGOPS) the SIG will provide complementary conference registration and a mentor at the conference. Please visit http://women.acm.org/scholarships.html for more information and for application deadlines. CTSB Exploration Grants We encourage faculty and graduate students to collaborate across departments on projects that might potentially lead to larger grant proposals. We are interested in supporting the hire of undergraduates as a part of these collaborative teams. Please contact Chris Riesbeck c-riesbeck@northwestern.edu for further details. Conference Submission Deadlines PACLIC 23 23rd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation in Hong Kong. Submissions due August 9, 2009. FLC 2009 3rd International Free Linguistics Conference in Sydney, Australia. Submissions due August 14, 2009. HCSNet Workshop on Movement and Motion Capturein Sydney, Australia. Submissions due August 14, 2009. 12th Annual Conference of Pragmatics Society of Japan in Kyoto, Japan. Papers due August 20, 2009. BACL British Association of Clinical Linguisticsin Edinburgh, United Kingdom. Papers due August 27, 2009. Upcoming Conferences and Workshops UCNLG+Sum Language Generation and Summarisation in Singapore, Singapore (August 6, 2009). LAW III The Third Linguistic Annotation Workshop in Suntec, Singapore (August 6-7, 2009). MWE 2009 Multiword Expressions: Identification, Interpretation, Disambiguation and Applications in Suntec, Singapore (August 6, 2009). Geaf 2009 Workshop on Grammar Engineering Across Frameworks in Singapore, Singapore (August 6, 2009). EMNLP 2009 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Singapore, Singapore (August 6-7, 2009). 2nd Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora: from parallel to non-parallel corpora in Suntec, Singapore (August 6, 2009). The People's Web meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources in Singapore, Singapore (August 6-7, 2009). TextInfer 2009 Workshop on Applied Textual Inference in Singapore, Singapore (August 6 2009). Named Entities Workshop: Shared Task on Transliterationin Suntec, Singapore (August 7, 2009). HCSNet Perception and Action Workshop: Tools and Techniques for Conducting EEG and MEG Experiments in Brisbane, Australia (August 9, 2009). CGiV09 6th International Conference Computer Graphics, Imaging and Visualizationin Tianjin, CHina (August 11, 2009). SOPO2009 Int'l Symposium on Photonics and Optoelectronics in Huhan, China (August 14, 2009). MOL 11 11th Meeting on the Mathematics of Language at the University of Bielefeld, Germany (August 20-21, 2009). Emotions & Machines Conference at the University of Geneva, Switzerland (August 21, 2009). CTF09 Concept Types & Frames in Language,Cognition & Science in Duesseldorf, Germany (August 24-26). Communication in Autism: An HCSNet Workshop in Sydney, Australia (August 24-25, 2009). SPIRE String Processing and Information Retrieval 2009 in Saariselka, Finland (August 24-28, 2009). LoLa10 10th Symposium on Logic and Language in Budapest/Gardony, Hungary (August 26-29, 2009). MT Summit Machine Translation Summit XII in Ontario, Canada (August 26-30, 2009). Crossmodal plasticity in deafness and cochlear implants in Rovereto, Italy (August 27-29, 2009). Talent in the Face of Deficit in Trondheim, Norway (August 27-28). Reading Groups If you would like to advertise a reading group, write ctsb@northwestern.edu to let us know. Employment Opportunities If you would like to advertise job openings within your research group or lab, please e-mail l-lumley@northwestern.edu, providing a brief description of the position(s) available, and any skills / experience required. The Articulab seeks social science research assistants for the Alex Project to begin as soon as possible. Work with a team to analyze children's language and science skills. The results will serve as the basis for technologies to help children acquire science and language skills. Tasks will include coding videotapes of children interacting, annotating their language and nonverbal behavior, analyzing language and communication data, and collecting data in schools and after-school programs. Ability to work independently, good computer skills, and an interest in linguistics, communication studies, African American studies, psychology, education or related fields are a plus. These positions could serve as the perfect basis for an honors thesis in Comm. Studies, Psychology, SESP, or Linguistics. $8/hour. Contact Kathleen Geraghty: k-geraghty@northwestern.edu You can sign-up, manage the way you receive the CTSB newsletter, or forward the current newsletter to a colleague, via the CTSB newsletter management page CENTER FOR TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR Northwestern University | Frances Searle Building, #2-431 | 2240 Campus Drive | Evanston, IL 60208 | USA http://ctsb.northwestern.edu