the general focus of our work is becoming increasingly important today networks is not a
new idea people have been engaging in social networks by which i mean
networks involving social systems
for centuries today because of technologies it becomes possible for us to be able to
communicate and collaborate with anyone anytime anyplace problem what the question then is having that
choice
who to be decided to collaborate with who do we decide to connect with
and that becomes a topic of tremendous interest both because it has engineering dimensions and
technological dimensions as well as the social dimensions
so it becomes truly cross disciplinary
a question
that then requires resources theories methods from across different disciplines whether is engineering communication or
management
so my focus is been primarily on understanding what are the socio technical drivers
as to how we use a networks to create teens to create collaborations to find
out who knows who to find out who knows what to find out who knows
who knows who and who knows who knows one
and a central research question is
to see how the dynamics of what is happening within wells like everquest are indicative
of what might be happening in terms of general social processes this gives us the
traffic exploratory
to be able to understand the dynamics
of why people choose to work with other people
why people tend to treat without the people exchange goods with people
to what extent is this driven by geographic proximity when it doesn't need to be
because we are in this case an online world to what extent is a do
is driven by shared interests
to what extent you end up choosing people who are friends of your friends
these are things we know happen and in the offline world
and what we're discovering is that actually the same dynamic seem to appear in the
online bar what is exciting is that industrial engineering and management sciences
has discovered that social networks and knowledge networks more generally are an important part of
what is happening at what ways
and while social network analysis as a field that grew up the social sciences i
spent a great deal of time in describing social networks
industrial engineering management sciences is particularly well positioned to be able to take
the understanding of the signs of networks and be able to use that for building
better than what's for engineering better networks
we have undergraduate students who from the very first your own belgian team projects so
they begin to experience first hand the recognition the engineering as an enterprise is not
a solid three affair that people need to work in teams people need to collaborate
and that even while a student's the competing with one another in some ways
in other context to prepare for the engineering well that the face they need to
build better collaboration skills
if you look at the grand societal challenges that we face in the twenty first
century whether it's environment whether it's and energy
whether it's in the public health area
all of these challenges that require a several disciplines to come together in order to
address the challenges
universities today
have to be geared towards being able to assemble the teams that bring together diverse
intellectual perspectives to be able to address these challenges
northwestern university has really stood out as one of the places at the forefront to
this movement
a cross the university whether it is in mccormick school of engineering school of communication
catalogue other medical school wind but you see there's a real spirit of being able
to recharge across in fact i would argue that is one of the competitive advantages
that not question has