From Disasters to WoW: Enabling Knowledge Networks in the 21st century

Recent advances in digital technologies invite consideration of organizing as a process that is accomplished by global, flexible, adaptive, and ad hoc networks that can be created, maintained, dissolved, and reconstituted with remarkable alacrity. A central challenge, spurred by these developments, is that the nature of teams and how they are assembled has changed radically. Using examples from his research in a wide range of activities such as disaster response, Communities of Practice at Procter & Gamble, public health and massively multiplayer online games (like World of Warcraft), Contractor will present a visual-analytic framework to Discover, Diagnose, and Design our 21st century knowledge networks.

Speaker Bios

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He directs the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University and is a Research Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications 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. His research program has been funded continuously for the past decade by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, NIH, NASA, and the Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundations.Professor Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers. His book titled Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge and published by Oxford University Press) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. He is the lead developer of CIKNOW (Cyberinfrastructure for Inquiring Knowledge Networks On the Web) a knowledge network discovery, diagnosis, and design system to enable communities, as well as Blanche, a software environment to simulate the dynamics of social networks.

Date:
Haut-parleurs:
Noshir Contractor
Affiliation:
Northwestern University