A Classmate of Obama's and the Serendipity of Travel

One never knows the experiences that await nor the interesting people one might meet while traveling. As an academic, the majority of my travel entails speaking engagements, whether at workshops or conferences, or in seminar settings. I also do my fair share of travel to serve on panels, including government panels, and give short courses.

My most recent trip, which I have written several posts on, was to Honolulu, Hawaii, to speak at the Workshop on Social Theory and Social Computing. The workshop organizer, Dr. Sun-ki Chai, who is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii, told me at the workshop banquet at a Korean restaurant in Honolulu, that he was a classmate of President Obama's at the Punahou School and that they both graduated together as the class of 1979 (interestingly, they were also classmates earlier in their elementary school). How often does one meet an academic colleague who can say that he went to school and graduated with the President of the US?!

Obama went on to Occidental College, and then transfered to Columbia University; afterwards he received his law degree from Harvard. Dr. Sun-ki Chai, on the other hand, went on to Stanford, where he received 3 degrees, in Mathematical Sciences (a Bachelor's), Computer Science (a Master's), and in Political Science (the PhD).

The Punahou School, which goes from grades K-12, is the largest independent, co-educational school in the US. Given the kind of intellectual leaders that it has graduated, it deserves a round of applause.

Advances in Social Computing

I am back from the International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction, SBP 2010, that took place at NIH (the National Institutes of Health) in Bethesda, Maryland. Although my shuttle van from Bethesda to the Baltimore airport had a flat tire on the busy highway, plus my hotel room had to be switched twice due to excessive noise and a group of strangers trying to enter my room late at night (what is travel without adventures), the conference was a great success. I have the best souvenir from the conference (in addition to the wonderful conversations that I had and great talks that I attended plus new people that I met) and that is the handsomely edited conference proceedings.

The conferees were given the proceedings volume, Advances in Social Computing, which was just released by Springer and was edited by Dr. Sun-Ki Chai, Dr. John Salerno, and Dr. Patricia Mabry of NIH, who was the conference chair. Dr. Patrick Qiang and I gave a tutorial on Fragile Networks immediately preceding the conference on Monday and today Dr. Qiang presented our paper, A Knowledge Collaboration Network Model Across Disciplines, which is published in the proceedings volume. We had excellent questions after the presentation (always a good sign), which we could answer (this is also a plus). We received a great compliment when one of the conferees (an academic from George Mason University) came up to us afterwards and said that he came to the conference explicitly to hear our talk.

The campus of NIH is gorgeous with a lot of trees and blooming flowers. Our conference took place in the Natcher Building, Room 45, and there were no parallel sessions, so there was a lot of community building.

What could be better than very smart people from many different disciplines getting together to talk about very important problems! The range of papers (on topics from childhood obesity to prevention of epidemics to inappropriate emergency department utilization to syndromic surveillance to information overload and viral marketing, to highlight just a few) in Advances in Social Computing certainly reflects this!