The SBP 2011 Tutorial Presentations Are Now Online!

If you missed the three excellent tutorials that were delivered this past Monday, as part of the Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (SBP) 2011 Conference at the University of Maryland College Park, you may access the presentations online!

Tutorial 1: Toolkits for Computational Social Science: Using Honest Signals to Predict and Shape Human Responses

Alex `Sandy' Pentland, MIT

Tutorial Slides: funf Mobile Sensing System

Tutorial Slides: Influence Model

Tutorial 2: Social Network Analysis of Personal and Group Networks

Allen Tien, Medical Decision Logic

Chris McCarty, University of Florida Survey Research Center

Eric C. Jones, University of North Carolina-Greensboro

Tutorial Slides

Tutorial 3: Understanding Social Media: Tools, Applications, and Processes

Nitin Agarwal, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Tutorial Slides

The above photos were taken at these tutorials.

Thanks again to the outstanding presenters and to the audiences for the great questions and discussions! Also, thanks to the tutorial presenters for making their lecture slides available!

Three Fabulous Plenary Speakers Confirmed for the Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference!

I can hardly contain my excitement.

We have three outstanding plenary speakers confirmed for the Northeast Regional INFORMS Conference that will take place at UMass Amherst, May 6-7, 2011, and they are:

Dr. Brenda Dietrich of IBM, who will speak on a Smarter Planet.

Dr. Alex "Sandy" Pentland of the Media Lab at MIT, who will give the plenary talk: Building A Nervous System for Humanity: Making Health, Financial, Logistics, and Transportation Networks Work, and

Dr. David Simchi-Levi of MIT, who is also the Editor of the flagship journal, Operations Research, who will be speak on Flexibility--From Practice to Theory.

The panels for this conference are also confirmed and I am delighted that there will be an all student panel.

Please check out the conference website, since it is regularly getting updated.

Both Dr. Brenda Dietrich and Dr. Sandy Pentland spoke earlier in our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series, so it will be terrific to welcome them back. I will be seeing Dr. Pentland even before then, since he is giving a tutorial at the SBP 2011 conference that will take place at the University of Maryland College Park at the end of this month. I am serving as the Tutorial Chair at this conference.

And, as for a confirmed tutorial at our UMass Amherst conference, I am absolutely delighted that Mr. Greg H. Parlier, a retired colonel, will give the tutorial: Transforming U.S. Army Supply Chains: Management Innovation in DoD for Improved Efficiency, Productivity, and Cost-Effective Global Operations.

This will certainly be a Spring with some wonderful conferences, which I will be blogging about, of course!

Thanks to all the conference organizers and program committee members who devote so much time and effort to the organization of these important venues for researchers, practitioners, and students alike!

Hope to see you at UMass Amherst in the beautiful month of May and even at the SBP 2011 conference before then, if your schedules permit!

Info on the 2011 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (SBP 2011) is Now Online!

I am delighted to announce that the 2011 SBP conference program, along with tutorial information, and keynotes, is now posted online on the conference website.

The program committee has worked very hard and the conference speaker lineup is terrific. I might add that this conference has single track talks and all the talks are based on rigorously reviewed papers, which will appear in a Springer Proceedings volume, which is now in press.

The Keynote speakers and their keynotes are:

Kimberly Thompson
Kid Risk, Inc.
Using Models to Inform Policy: Insights from Modeling the Complexities of Global Polio Eradication
- March 29, 8:30-9:15am

Peter Cramton
University of Maryland
Medicare Auctions: A Case Study of Market Design in Washington, DC
- March 29, 1:00-1:45pm

Herbert Gintis
Central European University and the Santa Fe Institute
Agent-based Models of Complex Dynamical Systems of Market Exchange
- March 30, 1:00-1:45pm

Sarit Kraus
Bar-Ilan University and University of Maryland
Agents that Negotiate Proficiently with People
- March 31, 8:15-9:00am

The Tutorials take place on March 28, 2011 and the presenters and their tutorials are:

Tutorial, March 28, 8:30am–12:30pm:

Toolkits for Computational Social Science: Using Honest Signals to Predict and Shape Human Responses
Alex `Sandy' Pentland, MIT

Tutorial, March 28, 2:00–5:30pm:

Social Network Analysis of Personal and Group Networks
Allen Tien, Medical Decision Logic
Chris McCarty, University of Florida Survey Research Center
Eric C Jones, University of North Carolina-Greensboro

Tutorial, March 28, 2:00–5:30pm:

Behavioral Informatics: Data Management and Mining Techniques Enabling Computational Behavioral Science Jaideep Srivastava, University of Minnesota

Come and learn about topics ranging from health issues via Twitter to optimization-based influencing of village social networks in counterinsurgencies to location privacy protection on social networks and even to promoting coordination for disaster relief -- from crowdsourcing to coordination!

There will also be cross-fertilization roundtables.

Registration will soon be open!

Collective Intelligence, Successful Teams, and the Female Factor

Does collective intelligence exist?

This was the question that a group of researchers from MIT and Carnegie Mellon set out to answer and the results of their study have been published in the article, "Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups," in the October 29, 2010 volume of Science.

Clearly, the "design" of groups and teams has implications not only for management and a spectrum of organizations but also for engineering and even military operations (and I would even add educational institutions, including universities).

I came upon a reference to this study in yesterday's Boston Globe, in an article written by Carolyn Y. Johnson, entitled: "Group IQ." The article contains an interview with one of the co-authors, Thomas Malone of MIT's Sloan School, and it also included comments from Iain Couzin of Princeton (who was a fellow panelist with me at the World Science Festival's Traffic panel in NYC in June 2009).

The Science article was co-authored by Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone.

Pentland is the author of the truly fascinating book, Honest Signals, and we had the pleasure of hosting him in our Speaker Series at the Isenberg School.

He will be presenting a tutorial at the SBP 2011 conference on March 28, 2011 at the University of Maryland.

I was sufficiently intrigued by the Globe article to go and read the Science article.

In the article, the authors define a group's collective intelligence, c, as the general ability to perform a wide variety of tasks. Interestingly, they found that:

The "c factor" is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group!

The moral from this research study and "bosses" should listen up: do not dominate the conversation and include females (may I even say "diversity" matters) in the group if you wish to enhance collective intelligence and problem-solving, since social sensitivity makes a quantifiable difference.

Interestingly, recently, I published a paper on the wisdom of crowds in transportation networks and the disappearance of the Braess paradox, which received a lot of media attention. I expect the intriguing issues being raised by such studies will stimulate further research. In the meantime, I am enjoying very much working with my fantastic and diverse team at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks!