CTSB Newsletter June 2008 In this issue: Editorial | Events | Spotlights | News | Conferences | Funding | Groups | Jobs EDITORIAL Welcome to the June edition of the Center for Technology & Social Behavior (CTSB) newsletter! This month we spotlight CTSB faculty affiliate Noshir Contractor and second year Ph.D. student Brooke Foucault. We also welcome Alex Hill who will be a postdoc with us over the summer. In addition, we unveil a new time and new look for our first Friday event, Thank CTSB It's Friday. As always, we hope that you find the newsletter a useful resource for information about other CTSB affiliates, upcoming conference and grant deadlines, and reading groups and other activities. Please get in touch if you would like to publicize any news, achievements or announcements in the newsletter. CTSB newsletter editor, Alastair Gill , would also like to know of any resources or employment opportunities for inclusion. Until next month, enjoy the newsletter, and we hope to see you at one of the CTSB events. -- Justine Cassell (Director, CTSB) and Alastair Gill (Research Scientist, CTSB) EVENTS Upcoming CTSB events to mark in your calendar: Colloquium Series The CTSB Colloquium Series for 07-08 was wrapped up by Wendy Kellogg (Manager of Social Computing at IBM's Watson Research Center) who spoke on 'Ten Years of Social Computing at IBM'. We are currently putting together the exciting CTSB Colloquium Series for 08-09, and will announce the speakers soon. In the mean time, please check the CTSB colloquium page for announcements and details of previous talks. Thank CTSB it's Friday! June sees a trial run for a new time for our regular first Friday event, Thank CTSB It's Friday (TCIF). In June (and potentially throughout the summer), TCIF will take place at lunchtime, and lunch will be served. Join us this Friday, June 6 from 12:00 to 2:00pm in the CTSB meeting room (2-431, Frances Searle Building). It's a healthier (and yummier [and cheaper {and more convenient}]) lunch than you will get anywhere else! Everybody is invited (RSVPs to appreciated) . Please join us for the usual good food, refreshment and conversation. If you have specific topics you would like to discuss, please get in touch with Alastair Gill . SPOTLIGHTS Faculty Spotlight: Noshir Contractor Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Industrial Engineering & Management Science, Communication Studies, and Management & Organizations. He is also the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Group. Contractor holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (Chennai). Before joining Northwestern in 2007 he was on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for twenty years. Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers dealing with communicating and organizing. His 2003 book Theories of Communication Networks with Peter Monge (OUP) received the Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association, and his papers have received numerous top paper awards. Professor Contractor's research investigates factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in communities. Specifically, he is developing and testing theories and methods of network science to map, understand and enable more effective networks in a wide variety of contexts, such as business, engineering, disaster response teams, public health networks, digital media and learning networks, and in virtual worlds, such as Second Life. His research program has attracted funding for over a decade from the NSF, and other organizations including NIH, NASA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He has consulted with organizations including Procter & Gamble, Boeing, Fiat, McKinsey Management Consulting, Merrill Lynch, the National Cancer Institute, Paramount Pictures, and Vodafone. For further information about Professor Contractor's research, please visit his personal page or his lab webpage. Student Spotlight: Brooke Foucault Brooke Foucault is a second year Ph.D. student in the Media Technology and Society program, and is advised by Professor Justine Cassell. Before starting her Ph.D., Brooke worked as a design researcher for Intel's User Experience and User Centered Design groups. There she conducted ethnographic research in a variety of countries and on a variety of topics including mobile technology, pregnancy, aging, gaming, and small business practices. Prior to joining Intel, she earned her B.S. and M.S degrees in Communication and Human Computer Interaction from Cornell University where she worked with Professor Geri Gay in the Human Computer Interaction Group. Brooke's research focuses on the role that technology can play in understanding and reducing response bias in survey interviews. For survey data to be useful, respondents must give honest answers, even to sensitive questions. However, there is considerable disagreement in the literature about how survey interviewers can increase the chances that respondents will answer openly and honestly. Her research uses highly-controllable virtual human interviewers to identify precisely how various verbal and non-verbal behaviors contribute to interview rapport, and affect survey responding. She hopes to use the findings of her research to develop training and interviewing tools that will help improve survey response validity. This work is sponsored by an Innovations grant from the School of Communication, and by a grant from the Charles Cannell fund in Survey Metholodogy. CTSB Staff News: Alex Hill We also welcome our new CTSB post-doctoral researcher, Alex Hill, who will be working with us over the summer. Alex is a computer scientist specializing in Human Computer Interaction with a focus on 3D user interfaces. He received his doctorate while working in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. At EVL, Alex developed software tools to enable artists to develop virtual reality (VR) worlds and studied the relationship between users and their virtual representation or avatar. His dissertation topic concerned the development of an integrated development environment for VR worlds that can be used both on the desktop and within the CAVE virtual environment. In addition to bringing his expertise with real-time computer graphics and non-traditional input devices to the CTSB, Alex will be contributing to Articulab projects involving Embodied Conversational Agents. While he is at the CTSB this summer, Alex will be looking into software architectures and markup languages used to develop and deploy virtual peers. Faculty News Roundup Fabian Bustamante (EECS) has been awarded the E.T.S. Walton Award by the Science Foundation of Ireland. This award enables researchers from around the world to carry out research projects of their own choice in Ireland. Justine Cassell (Communication, EECS, Learning Science, Linguistics) has a paper ('Reactive Redundancy and Listener Comprehension in Direction-Giving' with Rachel Baker and Alastair Gill) at SIGDIAL, the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue workshop, which is co-located with the Association for Computational Linguistics conference in Columbus, Ohio in June. Eszter Hargittai (Communication) moderated the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program's 1st Spring Symposium, "Social Networks and the Good Society". The event featured two speakers, Cass Sunstein (University of Chicago) and Siva Vaidhyanathan (University of Virginia), who focused on the social implications of online communication. Aggelos Katsaggelos (EECS) had a paper entitled 'Automated Tracking of a Passive Endomyocardial Stiletto Catheter with Dephased FLAPS MRI: A Feasibility Study' in the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine conference last month in Toronto, Canada (other authors were Koktzoglou, Tsaftaris, Zuelhlsdorff, Li, and Dharmakumar). Don Norman (EECS) spoke on cognitive and emotional factors in design at the 2nd annual Design:Chicago seminar hosted by the Segal Design Institute, McCormick School of Engineering. Other speakers and panelists included Walter Herbst, director of the NU Master of Product Development program, Helen Maria Nugent, associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Jim Wicks, vice president and director of consumer experience design, Motorola. Funding Opportunities Note: the following list is not exhaustive. You can help by alerting us to relevant opportunities. The William T. Grant Foundation - The Scholars Program supports promising early career researchers from diverse disciplines. The award is intended to facilitate the professional development of early career scholars who have some demonstrated success in conducting high quality research and are seeking to further develop their skills and research program. Studies from these Scholars contribute to theory and policy/practice for improving the everyday settings of youth. Candidates are nominated by a supporting institution and must submit five-year research plans, including appropriate mentoring from senior investigators. Funding is around $350,000 over 5 years. Deadline for proposals is July 9. Since the Foundation only accepts one proposal per school (i.e. WCAS, SESP, McCormick, etc.), please contact the Office of Foundation Relations before applying. NSF - Social Psychology - The program supports basic research on human social behavior, including cultural differences and development over the life span. Among the many research topics supported are: attitude formation and change, social cognition, personality processes, interpersonal relations and group processes, the self, emotion, social comparison and social influence, and the psychophysiological and neurophysiological bases of social behavior. The scientific merit of a proposal depends on four important factors: (1) The problems investigated must be theoretically grounded. (2) The research should be based on empirical observation or be subject to empirical validation. (3) The research design must be appropriate to the questions asked. (4) The proposed research must advance basic understanding of social behavior. Full proposals are due July 15 (standard Grant Proposal Guidelines apply). NSF - Linguistics - The program supports scientific research of all types that focus on human language as an object of investigation. The program supports research on the syntactic, semantic, phonetic, and phonological properties of individual languages and of language in general; the psychological processes involved in the use of language; the development of linguistic capacities in children; social and cultural factors in language use, variation, and change; the acoustics of speech and the physiological and psychological processes involved in the production and perception of speech; and the biological bases of language in the brain. Full proposals are due July 15 (standard Grant Proposal Guidelines apply). Open Society Institute - This Fellowship supports outstanding individuals from around the world. The fellowship enables innovative professionals - including journalists, activists, academics, and practitioners - to work on projects that inspire meaningful public debate, shape public policy, and generate intellectual ferment within the Open Society Institute (OSI). The fellowship focuses on the following categories: National Security and the Open Society; Citizenship, Membership and Marginalization; Strategies and Tools for Advocacy and Citizen Engagement; Understanding Authoritarianism. Fellowships are generally awarded for one year. Applicants should complete the online application form prior to submitting all materials (final deadline July 31). NSF - Science, Technology, and Society (STS) - The program considers proposals that examine historical, philosophical, and sociological questions that arise in connection with science, engineering, and technology, and their respective interactions with society. STS has four components: Ethics and Values in Science, Engineering and Technology (EVS); History and Philosophy of Science, Engineering and Technology (HPS); Social Studies of Science, Engineering and Technology (SSS); Studies of Policy, Science, Engineering and Technology (SPS). Full proposals are due August 1 (pre-proposal not required). CTSB Exploration Grants A further reminder about the CTSB "exploration grants" program. Any interdisciplinary project qualifies. In particular, we encourage faculty and graduate students to collaborate across departments on projects that might potentially lead to larger grant proposals. We are particularly interested in supporting the hire of undergraduates as a part of these collaborative teams. If you are interested, please contact Justine Cassell . Conference Submission Deadlines Rhetoric in Society 2009 2nd Rhetoric in Society Conference Leiden, The Netherlands (January 21-23, 2009). Northwestern's Daniel J. O'Keefe (Communication) will be a keynote speaker. Submission deadline for abstracts is June 15. ICIDS 08 Interactive Storytelling 08 Erfurt, Germany (November 26-29). This is the 1st Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling which unites TIDSE (Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling) and ICVS (Virtual Storytelling - Using Virtual Reality Technologies for Storytelling). Submission deadline for for papers is June 15. DRR 2009 16th Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition San Jose, California (January 21-22, 2009). Submission deadline for abstracts is June 16. WBBTMine 08 Wikis, Blogs, Bookmarking Tools - Mining the Web 2.0 Workshop Antwerp, Belgium, (September 15), also collocated with the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD). Submission deadline for papers is June 16. Reading Groups If you would like to advertise a reading group, let Alastair know. Currently the Autism Reading Group meets on Fridays at 3pm in the CTSB (Frances Searle, room 2-431). This month's meetings will take place on June 6 and 20. If you would like to join the group, please contact Alastair. The Grounding Reading Group meets on the second and fourth Fridays of the month, at 1pm, in the CTSB. Grounding is the process of building common knowledge between interlocutors. The reading group focuses on the process of grounding and applications for computational systems. Meeting dates for June are the 13th and 27th. If you would like to join the group, please contact Kino Aguilar . The Children's Collaborative Problem Solving Reading Group is being organized to help us better understand children's cognitive and behavioral processes in the context of collaborative peer problem solving. Meeting time and place are yet to be confirmed, but anyone interested in participating in the group should email Francisco Iacobelli . Employment Opportunities If you would like to advertise any kind of job openings within your research group or lab, then please contact Alastair Gill , providing a brief description of the position(s) available, and any skills / experience required. 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