The science of social networks
Hi, my name is Steve Gustafson and I am a computer scientist in the Computational Intelligence Lab at GE Global Research. I’ve been leading projects for the past three years centered on understanding how customers are connected with information, each other, and communities. These projects develop and apply technologies from machine learning, data mining, network science, information retrieval, text mining and natural language processing. I try to apply a ’science’ of measurement and understanding to these dynamic and complex systems, which are often either directly or indirectly social systems. Although it can be classified under many different names, I like to call this area Social Network Science.
Last week was TECHfest, our annual internal event that allows my colleagues and I to put together posters and demonstrations that showcase the technologies and research initiatives we are working on across all scientific disciplines. It was a pretty exciting week for me, since I was involved with a demonstration of one of my group’s Social Network Science initiatives called ‘Buzz TECHfest’.
For this demo, we showed how organizations within Global Research and technologies were ‘connected’ using real-time network visualizations, term/tag clouds, various line charts, and technology groups. At our TECHfest table, we asked each person who stopped by to enter their organization name and what cool technologies they had already seen at TECHfest. We also had a Web site set up where employees could enter the same information from their own computers.
Based on their input, we recommended other organizations to check out as well as other technologies they may be interested in. We obtained inputs from employees at our global locations in New York, Shanghai, Munich, and Bangalore. All in all, close to 200 people participated. With no system crashes or visualization problems, the ‘Buzz TECHfest’ demonstration was a success!
Some of the top ‘cool’ technologies Global Research scientists entered into our TECHfest demonstration were Pulse Detonation Engine, Smart Grid, the GE Brain, the Biotic Man, Imaging, electric car and solar. From this set of technologies, it was interesting to see how distributed the different organizations’ opinions were across those tech areas (at Global Research we are broken up internally into different organizations based on technology focus areas). Smart Grid was mentioned by almost every organization since it has so many aspects where technology from different disciplines will be vital. Also, it was interesting to see how the different technologies were connected by the attendees’ interests. For people who study technology and social networks, these connections capture the knowledge of an organization that can be used to organize and manage information as well as suggest new intersections to explore. For example, one strong cluster of ‘interest’ was the GE Brain, RFID technologies, Services and the Electric Car – may be something interesting to explore! Perhaps we’ll start work on an electric car with artificial intelligence that we track with sensors while it performs repairs to another machine!
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