Past CNS Talks

Abstract: Philip Beesley of Waterloo Architecture will present recent work by the Living Architecture Systems group that explores a new generation of sentient architectural environments. Working with artists, engineers and scientists, the research collective combines the crafts of lightweight textile structures, dense arrays of distributed computer controls with machine learning, and artificial-life chemistry. New architectural installations within the collaboration feature dense reticulated grottos with breathing, reactive, near-living qualities. Thin layers of hovering filters are tuned for delicate kinetic and chemical responses in the form of expanded physiologies, beckoning and sharing space with viewers.

The presentation will suggest that conception of buildings can move from classical ideas of a static world of closed boundaries toward the expanded physiology and dynamic form of a metabolism. The architecture of historical Humanism encouraged stripped surfaces supporting free human action. Yet need we say that the boundaries of my body lie only at our skins and that the boundaries of a building must be defined by an enclosing envelope? My clothing floats and ripples outward. Fluxing heat and cold cloaks me. The systems that appear within life-giving forests and jungles seem opposite to the rigid, stable enclosures of classically defined building. Instead of valuing resistance and closure, design for thermal exchange could result in new form-languages based on maximum interaction. Architecture could be founded on adaptation and uncertainty where acquiring and shedding heat play in uneven cycles. The densely layered forms of a jungle are often made of diffusive, deeply interwoven materials that expand and interact with their surroundings. The kind of diffusive forms seen in reticulated snowflakes and the microscopic manifolds of mitochondria have a common form-language of radical exfoliation. Their increased surface areas can make their reaction-surfaces potent. These kinds of forms offer delicacy, resonance and resilience.

Writ large, these forms speak of involvement with the world. A new city designed to easily handle unstable conditions of shedding heat and cooling and then rapidly warming up and collecting heat again might well look like a hybrid forest where each building is made from dense layers of ivy-like filters and multiple overlapping layers of porous openings. A building system using an expanded range of reticulated screens and canopies is implied, constructed from minutely balanced filtering layers that can amplify and guide convective currents encircling internal spaces. Within this renewed city fabric, the thermal plumes surrounding clusters of human occupants offer a new form of energy that could be ingested, and diffused, and celebrated.

Bio: Philip Beesley, MRAIC OAA RCA, is a practicing visual artist, architect, and Professor in Architecture at the University of Waterloo and Professor of Digital Design and Architecture & Urbanism at the European Graduate School.

He serves as the Director for the Living Architecture Systems Group, and as Director for Riverside Architectural Press. His Toronto-based practice Philip Beesley Architect Inc. operates in partnership with the Europe-based practice Pucher Seifert and the Waterloo-based Adaptive Systems Group, and in numerous other collaborations. The studio’s methods incorporate industrial design, digital prototyping, and mechatronics engineering. Beesley frequently collaborates with artists, scientists and engineers. Recent projects include a series of hybrid fabrics developed with Atelier Iris van Herpen, curiosity-based machine learning environments developed with Rob Gorbet and Dana Kulic of the Adaptive Systems Group, and synthetic metabolisms developed with Rachel Armstrong of the University of Newcastle. His most recent collaboration with Iris Van Herpen has translated a shared sensibility for subtle materials, electricity, and chemistry into a collection of highly complex and diverse textile and haute couture collections.

His research focuses on responsive and distributed architectural environments and interactive systems, flexible lightweight structures integrating kinetic functions, microprocessing, sensor and actuator systems, with particular focus on digital fabrication methods and sheet-material derivations. Beesley has authored and edited sixteen books and proceedings, and has appeared on the cover of Artificial Life (MIT), LEONARDO and AD journals. Features include national CBC news, Vogue, WIRED, and a series of TED talks. His work was selected to represent Canada at the 2010 Venice Biennale for Architecture, and has received distinctions including the Prix de Rome, VIDA 11.0, FEIDAD, Azure AZ, and Architizer A+.

This talk is sponsored by the Data Science Program, Intelligent Systems Engineering Program, and the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, all SOIC, IU.

Abstract:
Faculty from different departments present their data science research.

Speakers:
Ying Ding, Associate Professor of Informatics
Matt Josefy, Assistant Professor, Kelley School of Business
Predrag Radivojac, Professor of Computer Science and Informatics

Abstract:
Faculty from different departments present their data science research.

Speakers:
Jorge Mario Mejia, Assistant Professor, Kelley School of Business
Ehren Newman, Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Franco Pestilli, Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Chen Yu, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Abstract: This work in progress compares the strength of existing co-affiliations and collaborations with the number and capacity of air flights at the city level. We use a novel algorithmic approach that transforms distances to capture the interplay of collaboration and air traffic. Accompanying visualizations communicate research strengths and major bridges to international partners in support of data-driven decision making. More than 50,000 publications by IU faculty published between 2008 and 2016 are used to exemplify the method and to showcase the global reach of IU's research (collaborations).

Bio: Adam Ploszaj is an assistant professor at the Centre for European Regional and Local Studies EUROREG, University of Warsaw, and a visiting professor at Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science (CNS) Center, Indiana University Bloomington. He is an expert on regional and local development. His research interests include R&D policy, scientometrics, territorial cooperation, and public policy evaluation. Adam frequently acts as a consultant to international organizations (European Commission, European Parliament, World Bank, United Nations Development Programme), as well as Polish institutions (e.g. Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Ministry of Regional Development). Currently, he works on the book entitled “The geography of scientific collaboration: theory, evidence and policy”.

Xiaoran Yan is an Assistant Research Scientist at Indiana University Network Science Institute. His research concerns mathematical theories and models of networks, with a focus on community structures and dynamical processes on networks. In collaboration with Katy Borner, they are trying to correlate scholarly networks with geographic and disciplinary maps to produce networks and visualizations to better capture academic activities.

Katy Börner is the Victor H. Yngve Distinguished Professor of Information Science in the Department of Information and Library Science, School of Informatics and Computing, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, Core Faculty of Cognitive Science, Research Affiliate of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and Biocomplexity Institute, Member of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory, Founding Director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN and Visiting Professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in The Netherlands. She is a curator of the international Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit. She holds a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Technology in Leipzig, 1991 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern, 1997. She became an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in 2012.

Abstract:
LALink: Educational Data Science (Virtual) Demos
Traditional universities are struggling to provide expanding skill sets to increasingly diverse student populations while containing the costs and confronted with competition from technologically novel educational platforms such as MOOCs. Just as precision medicine, supply chain management, and targeted marketing use big data to improve efficiency and effectiveness in respective sectors of the economy, institutions of higher education must apply data-driven decision making to stay competitive and offer affordable, high value added education. This event features presentations on learning sciences research and learning analytics tools by experts from three universities—The University of Texas at Arlington, University of Michigan, and Indiana University.

UTA: Bridging Research and Practice
Large scale data has resulted in increased interest in learning sciences and related research. Much of this research interest is coming from non-traditional education fields as physicists, biologists, and others begin to analyze the data generated by learners in online and blended environments. A second trend has been to incorporate the practices of business intelligence to improve how universities make decisions about student support, recruitment, and institutional resource allocation. In most universities, the research and the practice of analytics are treated as separate silos. At University of Texas Arlington, we have created an integrated model where our learning analytics research (LINK Research Lab) coordinates extensively with our University Analytics department. This discussion will focus on the components of an integrated research/practice system as well as the challenges and ongoing opportunities.

Digital Innovation Greenhouse at University of Michigan
The University of Michigan has engaged in a breadth approach to learning analytics, and is involved in scholarly activity in the field, applied technology development, and institutional infrastructure investment. In this talk, the rich ecosystem of educational innovation initiatives will be surveyed, with a particular focus on (a) investments in scholarly learning analytics work, including two $1.25M interdisciplinary learning analytics grants funded in part through the UM data science initiative, (b) activities in the Digital Innovation Greenhouse (DIG), which serves as an on-campus education technology accelerator to address this challenge (http://ai.umich.edu/about-ai/digital-innovation-greenhouse), and (c) institutional investment in Unizin and the development of a learning analytics architecture to enable data-driven rescission making.

Learning Analytics Initiatives at Indiana University
We will present the initial developments of learning analytics initiatives at Indiana University at an institutional level. We will also give an overview of our experience in processing, analyzing, visualizing, and interpreting the e-textbook reading behavior data that is available from the Unizin Engage e-text reader and discuss the research implications of studying instructional activity data from digital learning environments such as the Learning Management System (LMS).

Bio:
Dr. George Siemens is Professor and Executive Director of the Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge Research Lab at University of Texas, Arlington and cross-appointed with the Centre for Distance Education at Athabasca University. He has delivered keynote addresses in more than 35 countries on the influence of technology and media on education, organizations, and society. His work has been profiled in provincial, national, and international newspapers (including NY Times), radio, and television. He has served as PI or Co-PI on grants totaling more than $11m, with funding from NSF, SSHRC (Canada), Intel, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Soros Foundation. He has received numerous awards, including honorary doctorates from Universidad de San Martín de Porres and Fraser Valley University for his pioneering work in learning, technology, and networks. He holds an honorary professorship with University of Edinburgh and adjust status with University of South Australia. Dr. Siemens is a founding President of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (http://www.solaresearch.org). In 2008, he pioneered massive open online courses (sometimes referred to as MOOCs). He blogs at http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/ and on Twitter: gsiemens

Pete Smith Smith is Chief Analytics Officer and Senior Associate Vice President at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he oversees the office of University Analytics and coordinates with the Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge (LINK) lab, a learning analytics research laboratory. He previously served as Vice Provost for Digital Teaching and Learning for nearly 20 years. His teaching and research focuses on natural language processing, translation automation, and “big data” in education. A scholar of Russian language and culture, his teaching includes oversight of UTA’s Localization and Translation certificate, offered to students of seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Korean Portuguese, Russian) as an introduction to localization and the localization industry. Pete’s recent presentations and publications have centered on the role of big data in education and more comprehensive models of learning in complex environments such as higher education. He was recently recognized by the United States Distance Learning Association with a national award for “Outstanding Leadership by an Individual in the Field of Distance Learning,” for his role leading UTA to become a recognized leader in online learning.

Christopher Brooks is a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Director of Learning Analytics and Research in the Office of Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan. He works with colleagues to design tools to better the teaching and learning experience in higher education and in massive open online courses. His particular research focus is on understanding how learning analytics can be applied to human computer interaction through educational data mining, machine learning, and information visualization. His webpage is at http://christopherbrooks.ca

Serdar Abaci is the Educational Research and Evaluation Specialist for the Learning Technologies division of University Information Technology Services. Dr. Abaci conducts research on and evaluation of teaching and learning technologies. His research interests include feedback, online learning, program evaluation, and teaching and learning technologies in higher education. In his current research, Dr. Abaci examines e-textbook reading activity data to understand student engagement with reading materials, which can be a key determinant for learning and achievement in college. Dr. Abaci received his Ph.D. in Instructional Systems Technology and two Master’s degrees, one in Instructional Systems Technology and one in Educational Inquiry, all from Indiana University.

Joshua Quickis a graduate research assistant for Indiana University UITS Learning Technologies division. He is a doctoral student in the School of Education Learning Sciences program at IU. His research interest center on the use, development, and implementation of learning analytics techniques and tools in higher educational contexts. Prior to pursuing his doctoral degree, Joshua obtained a M.S. in Applied Statistics from the University of Alabama.

Abstract:

Abstract:
Faculty from different departments present their data science research.

Speakers:
Mike Jones, W. K. Estes Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
David Wild, Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing
Jingjing Zhang, Assistant Professor, Kelley School of Business
Damir Cavar, Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics
Xiaozhong Liu, Assistant Professor of Information Science
Katy Börner, Victor H. Yngve Distinguished Professor of Information Science

Abstract: In this talk I'll give an overview of my 10+ years experience of collecting and visualizing online social network data at the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) Lab, at the Australian National University. An initial inspiration for visualizing the web was the science fiction writer William Gibson's vision of cyberspace, which he described in his novel Neuromancer as “... clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”. In this early work I mapped hyperlink networks between organizational websites (e.g. political parties and social movement organizations), using tools developed for visualizing large scale networks such as the Internet architecture. My primary interest in social behavior on the web then led me to the field of social network analysis, with visualization approaches for identifying interesting properties of nodes in networks (for example, betweenness centrality) and networks themselves (for example, clustering). Social media provides new data sources for social network researchers, and I'll present some of my more recent work involving dynamic visualization of both network and text data from social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Throughout my talk I will also touch on more theoretically-oriented work, where colleagues and I have developed conceptual frameworks for analyzing networked social behavior online using visualization and statistical methods.

Bio: Robert Ackland is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Sociology and the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University. He has degrees in economics from the University of Melbourne, Yale University and the ANU, where he gained his PhD on index number theory in the context of cross-country comparisons of income and inequality in 2001, and he has worked as an economist at the Australian Department of Immigration and the World Bank. Since 2002 Robert has been conducting quantitative research into online social and organisational networks, and his research has appeared in journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Social Networks, Computational Economics, Social Science Computer Review, and the Journal of Social Structure. He leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks Lab (http://vosonlab.net/) and he created the VOSON software for hyperlink network construction and analysis, which has been publicly available since 2006 and is used by researchers worldwide. Robert established the Social Science of the Internet specialization in the ANU's Master of Social Research in 2008, and his book Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (SAGE) was published in 2013. Robert has been chief investigator on five Australian Research Council grants and in 2007, he was a UK National Centre for e-Social Science Visiting Fellow and James Martin Visiting Fellow based at the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2011, he was appointed to the Science Council of the Web Foundation's Web Index project and he recently contributed a background paper to the World Bank's World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends.

More information can be found here: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/ackland-rj

Abstract: The aesthetics of science is changing, the diffusion of data visualization tools is enabling a revival of beauty in scientific research. More and more papers are presented with seductive images, convincing videos, and sharp interactive tools. Scientific storytelling will be discussed with 2 case studies: "Charting Culture, 2014", and "Rise of partisanship, 2015". In the second part of the talk we explore the connection between Machine Learning & Data Visualization. We will see together 3 projects: News Explorer - exploration of real-time news, Ted Watson - exploration of a large corpus of videos, and Watson 500 - the analysis of relationships between entities and topics in a specific corpus of date. We encourage the public to use these tools before the talk:

http://news-explorer.mybluemix.net/
http://watson.ted.com/
http://watson500.mybluemix.net/

Jointly organized by the Data Science program and the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, this talk is partially supported by Indiana University’s Consortium for the Study of Religion, Ethics and Society, a consortium sponsored by the Vice President for Research Office

Bio: Mauro Martino is an Italian expert in data visualization based in Boston. He created and leads the Cognitive Visualization Lab at IBM Watson in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Martino’s data visualizations have been published in the scientific journals Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His projects have been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, and art galleries including the Serpentine Gallery, UK, GAFTA, USA, and the Lincoln Center, USA.

Abstract: Over the past year, I’ve been serving as a visiting artist in collaboration with Dr. Katy Börner, Professor of Information Science at IU Bloomington. This collaboration is part of the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science Exhibition (see scimaps.org). Using the purpose of this exhibition as a starting point, I have experimented with clay and wire to create 3-D prototypes representing the growth and intersections of distant fields of knowledge. As an artist, this project has inspired me to more carefully consider the meaning of form, surface, and color relationships as they are tied directly to specific information.

Organized by the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, this talk is supported by Indiana University’s Consortium for the Study of Religion, Ethics and Society, a consortium sponsored by the Vice President for Research Office.

Bio: Carrie Longley is a studio artist and educator. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Fine Art and Chair of the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Indiana University East. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Wittenberg University and a MFA from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. She exhibits her work extensively throughout the United States and has received numerous awards including “Emerging Craftsman” from Ohio Designer Craftsman, “The Bobby Kadis Award” at the Penland School of Crafts, MCACD Individual Artist Fellowship, and the William and Dorothy Yeck “Young Sculptor’s Award.”

Abstract: VOSON SocialMediaLab is an R package that provides a suite of tools for collecting and constructing networks from social media data. It provides easy-to-use functions for collecting data across popular platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) and generating different types of networks for analysis. SocialMediaLab also collects the associated text data from social media platforms (e.g. Tweets, Facebook fan page posts and comments, YouTube video comments).

In this workshop, participants will learn how to collect various types of social media data using SocialMediaLab and generate different types of ‘ready-made’ networks for analysis. Participants will also learn basic network and text analysis using R packages such as igraph and tm.

Assumed knowledge: A basic familiarity of R (or other programming languages) and basic concepts from network and text analysis.

This is a SSRC Workshop in Methods (WIM).

Bio: Robert Ackland is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Sociology and the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University. His PhD was in economics, focusing on index number theory in the context of cross-country comparisons of income and inequality. Robert has been studying online social and organisational networks since 2002 and his research has been funded by five Australian Research Council grants. His research has appeared in journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Social Networks, Computational Economics, Social Science Computer Review, and the Journal of Social Structure. He leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks Lab which was established in 2005 with the aim of advancing the social science of the Internet by conducting research, developing research tools, and providing research training. Robert established the Social Science of the Internet specialization in the ANU's Master of Social Research in 2008, and his book Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (SAGE) was published in 2013. He created the VOSON software for hyperlink network construction and analysis, which has been publicly available since 2006 and is used by researchers worldwide.

Abstract: Networks are a data structure commonly found in any social media service that allows populations to author collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation's NodeXL project makes analysis of social media networks accessible to most users of the Excel spreadsheet application. With NodeXL, network charts become as easy to create as pie charts. Recent research created by applying the tool to a range of social media networks has already revealed the variations in network structures present in online social spaces. A review of the tool and images of Twitter, flickr, YouTube, Facebook and email networks will be presented.

This talk is sponsored by IUNI.

Bio: Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Smith co-founded and directs the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit devoted to tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.

Abstract: Put simply, the GDELT Project (gdeltproject.org) is a realtime index over global human society, inventorying the world’s events, emotions, and narratives as they happen. GDELT live machine translates the world’s information across 65 languages and identifies the planet’s events, counts, quotes, people, organizations, locations, millions of themes and thousands of emotions, imagery, video, and social posts, creating a massive realtime global graph. Here’s what it looks like to conduct data analytics at a truly planetary scale.

Jointly organized by the Data Science program and the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, this talk is partially supported by Indiana University’s Consortium for the Study of Religion, Ethics and Society, a consortium sponsored by the Vice President for Research Office.

Bio: One of Foreign Policy Magazine's Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013, Kalev Leetaru is a Senior Fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security and a member of its Counterterrorism and Intelligence Task Force, as well as being a 2015-2016 Google Developer Expert for Google Cloud Platform. From 2013-2014 he was the Yahoo! Fellow in Residence of International Values, Communications Technology & the Global Internet at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he was also an Adjunct Assistant Professor, as well as a Council Member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government. Featured in the presses of more than 100 nations and from Nature to the New York Times, his work focuses on how innovative applications of the world's largest datasets, computing platforms, algorithms and mindsets can reimagine the way we understand and interact with our global world. More on his latest projects can be found on his website at kalevleetaru.com or blog.gdeltproject.org.