From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Wed Sep 28 2005 - 19:52:22 UTC
>From: cunews_at_cornell.edu
>Reply-To: cunews_at_cornell.edu
>To: CUNEWS-PHYSICAL_SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu (CUNEWS-PHYSICAL_SCIENCE-L),
> CUNEWS-SOCIAL_SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu (CUNEWS-SOCIAL_SCIENCE-L),
>CUNEWS-CAMPUS-L_at_cornell.edu (CUNEWS-CAMPUS-L),
>CUNEWS-SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu (CUNEWS-SCIENCE-L)
>CC: mwaldrop_at_nsf.gov
>Subject: Featuring Cornell: NSF funds cybertools project
>Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 15:34:20 -0400
>
>Cornell researchers receive $2 million federal grant for computational
>social sciences project using Web archive
>http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Sept05/NSFcybertools.dea.html
>
>Sept. 28, 2005
>
>By Daniel Aloi
>dea35_at_cornell.edu
>
>
>ITHACA, N.Y. -- A team of Cornell University researchers has been awarded a
>$2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop advanced Web
>tools for social sciences research.
>
>Ultimately intended to assist in the detailed statistical and observational
>study of social and information networks, the project will involve a team
>of computer scientists and social scientists developing the means -- dubbed
>"cybertools" -- to extract and analyze information from vast collections of
>data.
>
>The project's primary source of data will be the Internet Archive
><http://www.archive.org>, which is supported by the NSF and the Library of
>Congress, among others. One of the first steps in the project, which is
>funded through 2007, will be to transfer 30 percent, or 200 terabytes, of
>the massive archive to a computer server at Cornell for use by researchers.
>
>Developed by Brewster Kahle in 1996 and based at the Presidio in San
>Francisco, the archive comprises more than 40 billion Web pages. "This
>archive is the only copy that has been saved of how the Web has developed
>over the years," Cornell computer scientist William Arms said. It includes
>text, audio, moving images and software, as well as archived Web pages.
>
>"Faculty in computer science and the social sciences have been working
>together for many years at Cornell," said Michael W. Macy, sociology
>department chair and the project's principal investigator. "Cornell has the
>potential to be one of the leaders in computational social science; we have
>all of the pieces of the puzzle here."
>
>Other principals in the cybertools project are sociologist David Strang and
>computer scientists Dan Huttenlocher and Jon Kleinberg, who was recently
>awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
>
>The Cornell project was among the finalists for funding when Huttenlocher
>made the cybertools presentation to the NSF in Washington on Aug. 1. Macy,
>who was in Japan at the time, also participated via speakerphone. The
>project proposal's official title is "Very Large Semi-Structured Datasets
>for Social Science Research."
>
>"The Web is this amazing potential resource for data for social sciences
>work, but that takes some social scientists willing to be kind of guinea
>pigs and computer scientists willing to set aside their own interests,"
>said Huttenlocher, who teaches technology management in the Johnson
>Graduate School of Management.
>
>The computational social sciences research will include studies of the
>process of diffusion of innovation -- which includes the spread of new
>technologies, social and business practices, markets, fads and fashions; as
>well as norms, opinions and urban legends.
>
>"In 1972, the NSF began the General Social Survey, which became a mainstay
>of social science research," Macy said. "It is a very powerful tool. We see
>the tools we are building as having a similar impact in that they will open
>up to social scientists a wide array of ways to study social life we've
>never had access to in the past."
>
>Web logs (personal online diaries also known as "blogs") on services such
>as Livejournal and interactive community databases including the student
>directory Facebook also will provide data, because, unlike non-virtual
>communities, every interaction is recorded.
>
>"Social life is remarkably difficult to study," Macy said. "We have reams
>and reams of statistics, but what we don't have -- and what it has been
>hard to get access to -- is interaction between the participants."
>
>Professor of communication Geri Gay, who recently joined the cybertools
>team, has two undergraduate communication students who have already begun
>to collect data from Livejournal.
>
>"It's not only tracking what everybody posts, but information about the
>poster -- age, gender, interests, lists of all their friends," Macy said.
>"Of course, we don't know how truthful people are being, but we do know how
>others in the network are perceiving these demographic profiles, and that
>is also going to be very interesting to study as we map the opinion
>dynamics over time."
>
>Among the areas of study the cybertools project will touch on are the
>evolution of social norms and polarization of opinion in evolving networks
>-- "seeing how network structure affects opinions among friends and enemies
>and how opinions in turn shape an evolving network structure," Macy said.
>
>The cybertools research is part of "Getting Connected: Social Science in
>the Age of Networks," the 2005-08 interdisciplinary theme project of
>Cornell's Institute for the Social Sciences (ISS). Theme projects such as
>the current "Evolving Family" effort involve research projects, courses,
>events such as lectures by guest speakers and the engagement of
>constituencies both on and off campus.
>
>"The NSF said they really did like the idea that we were making a
>commitment to studying networks, and that this was an interdisciplinary
>project over a long period of time," said David Harris, ISS executive
>director
>
>Macy also helped to write the networks proposal chosen for the ISS theme
>project and is the leader of its 10-member team, which involves scholars in
>disciplines including sociology, economics, mathematics, psychology and
>communication.
>
>"We really tried to maximize the interdisciplinary nature of the group, as
>well as schools they were in, the kinds of things they were studying and
>the quality of the research they brought in," said ISS Director Elizabeth
>Mannix, who is in charge of the networks project.
>
>"In the intersection of the social sciences community and the information
>sciences community, there's a very technical side and a very social side
>that really need to start talking to each other," Mannix said. "We are in a
>unique position at Cornell to do that."
>
>
>-30-
>
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