Noshir Contractor, Professor, Department of Speech Communication, Department of Psychology, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Research Affiliate of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Co-Director of the Age of Networks Initiative at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Date:

Wednesday, March 28; 3:00 - 4:00p

Location:

211 Kennedy Hall

Note: A reception in 211 Kennedy Hall will precede the talk from 2:30 - 3:00p.

Abstract:

How does cyberinfrastructure – the ability for someone to access data, tools and analytics anywhere at anytime – affect communities? Advances in digital technologies invite consideration of the way communities are organized as a process that is accomplished by global, flexible, adaptive, and ad hoc networks that can be created,
maintained, dissolved, and reconstituted with remarkable speed. This
presentation will outline the major socio-technical advances and challenges for the successful development, deployment, and growth of cyberinfrastructure to support communities. Contractor will use examples from his ongoing research on communities
involved in a wide range of activities such as disaster response, environmental engineering, public health, economic resilience, educational diversity, and massively multiplayer online games (WoW - >the World of Warcraft).

Bio:

Noshir Contractor is a Professor in the Departments of Speech Communication, Psychology, and Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Co-Director of the Age of Networks Initiative at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in communities. Specifically, his research team is developing and testing theories and methods of network science to map, understand and enable more effective (i) disaster response networks, (ii) public health networks, (iii) transnational immigrant networks, (iv) massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) networks and (v) environmental engineering networks. His research program has been funded continuously for the past decade by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Professor Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers dealing with communication. His book titled 'Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge and published by Oxford University Press in English and scheduled to be published by China Renmin University Press in simplified Chinese in 2007) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. He is the lead developer of IKNOW (Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web), and its Cyberinfrastructure extension CI-KNOW, a network recommender system to enable communities using cyberinfrastructure, as well as Blanche, a software environment to simulate the dynamics of social networks.

For more information, please contact Connie Yuan.

[handout] [schedule]

3-26-2007 Sarah