NICO is hosting another round of research lightning talks as a part of our Wednesdays@NICO seminar series. Open to Northwestern graduate student or postdoctoral fellows! If you are interested in giving a lightning talk (~12 minutes with questions) to the broader NICO audience, please sign up here: bit.ly/lightning-nico

Speakers will be balanced based on their topics/disciplines in order to provide a broad representation of the research activities at NICO.

Speakers:

Rod Abhari - PhD Student, Media, Technology, and Society "Analyzing Cross-Platform Media Polarization with Multilayer Networks"

Although much has been said about the consequences of new media for polarization, far less research has compared audience polarization across the broad array of platforms and news sources that constitute the diet of the modern media consumer. Using a cross-sectional survey of 986 respondents, we modeled a multilayer audience duplication network where news sources were represented as nodes connected by overlapping audiences and located on a separate layer for each media platform they were reported on. We constructed two audience duplication networks for liberal and conservative audiences separately and then measured partisan overlap among sources by computing the Pearson correlation coefficient between the two networks using the QAP network correlation procedure. Unlike past research, our multilayer audience duplication networks allow us to measure two significant phenomena: within-platform polarization, or the partisan overlap for distinct sources consumed within the same platform, and between-platform polarization, or the partisan overlap for the same source consumed across multiple platforms.

Oh-Hyun Kwon - PhD Student, Kellogg School of Management "Is Innovation Suspense or Surprise?"

In this study, we find that suspenseful and surprising innovations hold distinct predictabilities and future impacts, by constructing an embedding space of the classification codes. Specifically, suspenseful innovations gradually increase contextual similarity, and long-term innovation prediction becomes possible. On the other hand, surprising innovation is more challenging to predict, but it brings more impact on the domain. These findings can help approach innovations and their impact.

Y. Jasmine Wu - PhD Candidate, Communication Studies "Information sharing in the hybrid workplace: Understanding the role of ease-of-use perceptions of communication technologies in advice-seeking relationship maintenance"

Shifts to hybrid work prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic have the potential to sibstantially impact social relationships at work. Hybrid employees rely heavily on digital collaboration technologies to communicate and share information, and employees’ perceptions of the technologies are critical in shaping organizational networks. However, the dyadic-level misalignment in these perceptions may lead to relationship dissolution. To explore the social network consequences of hybrid work, we conducted a two-wave survey in a department of an industrial manufacturing firm. Our results of Stochasic Actor-Oriented Models show that employees were less likely to maintain their advice-seeking ties when they had a mismatch in the ease-of-use perception of technology with their colleagues. The effect was stronger when advice-seekers tended to work remotely. The study provides empirical insights into how congruence in employees' perceptions of organizational communication technologies relates to the dynamics of advice networks in the hybrid workplace.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98133745974
Passcode: NICO23

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

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