Uptown

Today I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal in an article on scientific collaborations by Robert Lee Hotz. The talented Lauren Goode also did a short video accompanying the online edition, in which I talk a little bit more about the advantages and problems of collaboration. Here's an excerpt of the piece:

Once a mostly solitary endeavor, science in the 21st century has become a team sport. Research collaborations are larger, more common, more widely cited and more influential than ever, management studies show. Measured by the number of authors on a published paper, research teams have grown steadily in size and number every year since World War II.

To gauge the rise of team science, management experts at Northwestern University recently analyzed 2.1 million U.S. patents filed since 1975 and all of the 19.9 million research papers archived in the Institute for Scientific Information database. "We looked at the recorded universe of all published papers across all fields, and we found that all fields were moving heavily toward teamwork," says Northwestern business sociologist Brian Uzzi.

As research projects grow more complicated, management becomes a variable in every experiment. "You can't do it alone," says research management analyst Maria Binz-Scharf at City College of New York. "The question is how you put it all together."

The key is bringing the people together in the first place, which has sped technological advancements that often benefited the rest of us. The ease of global business and social networking today owes much to the World Wide Web, which was designed to aid information-sharing between scientists. It was invented at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the home of the Large Hadron Collider.

New online science management experiments are underway. Last year, the National Science Foundation started a $50 million project to map all plant biology research, from the level of molecules to organisms to entire ecosystems, so scientists can swoop through shared data as if they were using Google Earth. Last month, U.S. computer experts launched a $12 million federal project to create a national biomedical network called VIVOweb to encourage collaborations.

Scientists are experimenting with the new technology of teamwork even in mathematics, where researchers customarily work alone.

This is such an exciting area of research. Together with Leslie Paik and Avrom Caplan, I will be devoting a good part of the next three years to study how scientists collaborate. This work is supported by the NSF (see here for the project abstract and here for the CCNY press release).

(Crossposted at Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

I knew I was in for a treat when I sat down to listen to Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger at NYU's Law School yesterday afternoon. Viktor discussed his new book, Delete - The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, and kicked off a book tour that will take him to several US locations (I've listed upcoming talks below). Although he had arrived from Singapore only hours prior to giving his talk, he engaged the audience with his clever presentation, leaving us wanting more even after 45 minutes of Q&A.

Mayer-Schoenberger beautifully illustrates our society's transition from "biological forgetting to digital remembering". While for generations our efforts have concentrated on trying to remember events, actions, etc. and preserve them for posterity, in today's world we are facing the opposite problem: The digital memory is here to stay. However, the book argues, forgetting has its virtues, and needs to be reintroduced. The solution is simple: Put an expiration date on information.

The book is a great read (as soon as I got it, my non-academic spouse snagged it and took it on a business trip, which usually doesn't happen with the books I order), and I am not even close to doing it justice with this description, so if you find yourselves near any of the locations of the book tour, make sure to stop by and join the discussion.

Future stops (from here):
• Harvard's Berkman Center on October 7 at 6 pm
• Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy on October 8 at 4.30 pm
• Town Hall Seattle on October 19 at 7.30 pm
• University of California Berkeley Law School on October 22 at 4 pm

I recently accepted the challenge to raise funds to fight breast cancer as part of the 2008 Komen NYC Race for the Cure® on Sunday, September 14, 2008. One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in her lifetime and the more we raise, the more the Greater New York City Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure can give to fund vital breast cancer education, screening and treatment programs in our own community and support national peer-reviewed research programs to find the cures.

Please join me in the fight by pledging in support of my participation in the Race or contributing generously to Komen Greater NYC. Your tax-deductible contribution will fund innovative outreach and awareness programs for medically underserved communities in greater New York City, in addition to national breast cancer research. You can make a donation online by simply clicking on the link at the bottom of this message. If you would prefer, you can also send your contribution to the address listed below.

Komen Greater NYC Race for the Cure
P.O. Box 9223, GPO
New York, NY 10087-9223

Whatever you can give will help! I truly appreciate your support and will keep you posted on my progress.

Thank you so much for your time and support in the fight against breast cancer! Every step counts!

Click here to visit my personal page:
http://www.komennyc.org/site/TR/Race/race2008-wide?px=1597643&pg=personal&fr_id=1150&et=4YOJa_poq0wLzTEdWfhKyQ..&s_tafId=30142

Click here to view the team page for Record Busters:
http://www.komennyc.org/site/TR/Race/race2008-wide?team_id=23650&pg=team&fr_id=1150&et=WVDA66Ok33IE1BaW8al7wA..&s_tafId=30142

(Crossposted at Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

Ines Mergel, David Lazer and I have a paper out in the International Journal of Learning and Change on voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Based on data from our study of forensic scientists in government crime labs, we investigated why individuals make the time and effort to answer questions directed at them. In a multi-level framework we identify several influencing factors at the individual, relational, group, and informational level. Here's the abstract:

Knowledge is essential for the functioning of every social system, especially for professionals in knowledge-intensive organisations. Since individuals do not possess all the work-related knowledge that they require, they turn to others in search for that knowledge. While prior research has mainly focused on antecedents and consequences of knowledge sharing and understanding why people do not share knowledge, less is known why people provide knowledge, and what conditions trigger voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Our article addresses this gap by proposing a multi-level framework for voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing: individual, relational, group, and informational. We provide illustrations from a particular knowledge-intensive community, DNA forensic scientists who work at public laboratories.

A pdf version is available from the Inderscience website.

(Crossposted at Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

This hardly comes as a surprise: Corporations are increasingly tapping into the social capital of networks such as Facebook and MySpace, as reported in this NY Times article by Laurie J. Flynn today. From a theoretical standpoint, it makes a lot of sense: The ties in these online social networks reflect several layers of homophily (friendship, common interests, membership in various groups, partially self-selected affiliation, etc.) in addition to what usually applies to even the best organizational communities of practice. Several companies are now integrating business intelligence applications with the social Web and the Internet. Such "interrelated pools of information" bring value to business, says Flynn, mainly by fostering communication among employees, but also by better identifying job candidates and target customers. Let's just hope that Facebook will react to this development and allow the creation of different profiles for the various personae we represent on the Internet.

The article appeared in a special section of the New York Times today called "Tech Innovation". The section is filled to the brim with exciting and innovative ideas - one of these coming from the ever resourceful Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs. Together with his team he developed the prediction markets tool "Brain" (Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks), which can be employed to predict the demand of a new service, such as Internet television. I loved Huberman's quote a propos his brainchild: "We want to reduce the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of 12 or 13 people." Hopefully the right ones.