Peter A. Gloor

Visualization of Communication Patterns in Collaborative Innovation Networks - Analysis of Some W3C Working Groups

Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) are groups of self-motivated individuals from various parts of an organization or from multiple organizations, empowered by the Internet, who work together on a new idea, driven by a common vision. In this paper we report first results of a project that examines innovation networks by analyzing the e-mail archives of some W3C (WWW consortium) working groups. These groups exhibit ideal characteristics for our purpose, as they form truly global networks working together over the Internet to develop next generation technologies. We first describe the software tools we developed to visualize the temporal communication flow, which represent communication patterns as directed acyclic graphs, We then show initial results, which revealed significant variations between the communication patterns and network structures of the different groups., We were also able to identify distinctive communication patterns among group leaders, both those who were officially appointed and other who were assuming unofficial coordinating roles.

Finding Collaborative Innovation Networks Through Correlating Performance with Social Network Structure

This paper contributes to the ongoing stream of research correlating social network structure with individual and organizational performance. While teaching a course on optimizing online communication behaviour and social network analysis, we collected preliminary data on the relationship between dynamic social network structures and individual and team performance. Students from Helsinki University of Technology and University of Cologne, who had never met face to face, formed virtual interdisciplinary teams collaborating on a common task, the communication analysis of online communities. As part of their task, students correlated performance of the community they were analysing with social network structure. In this research, we compare social network structure and individual and team performance of participants in a multi-user online computer game with social network structure and performance among the student teams. While among computer gamers the number of communication links predicts performance, a balanced contribution index predicts performance of the student knowledge worker teams. We also give general recommendations for efficient virtual communication behaviour.

Correlating temporal communication patterns of the Eclipse open source community with performance and creativity

This paper studies the temporal communication patterns of online communities of developers and users of the open source Eclipse Java development environment. It measures the productivity of each community and seeks to identify correlations that exist between group communication characteristics and productivity attributes. The study uses the TeCFlow (Temporal Communication Flow) visualizer to create movie maps of the knowledge flow by analyzing the publicly accessible Eclipse developer mailing lists as an approximation of the social networks of developers and users. Thirty-three different Eclipse communities discussing development and use of components of Eclipse such as the Java Development Tools, the different platform components, the C/C++ Development Tools and the AspectJ extension have been analyzed over a period of six months. The temporal evolution of social network variables such as betweenness centrality, density, contribution index, and degree have been computed and plotted. Productivity of each development group is measured in terms of two indices, namely performance and creativity. Performance of a group is defined as the ratio of new bugs submitted compared with bugs fixed within the same period of time. Creativity is calculated as a function of new features proposed and implemented. Preliminary results indicate that there is a correlation between attributes of social networks such as density and betweenness centrality and group productivity measures in an open source development community. We also find a positive correlation between changes over time in betweenness centrality and creativity, and a negative correlation between changes in betweenness centrality and performance.

Analyzing Actors and Their Discussion Topics by Semantic Social Network Analysis

iQuest is a novel software system to improve understanding of organizational phenomena with greater precision, clarity, and granularity than has previously been possible. It permits to gain new insights into organizational behavior, addressing issues such as tracking information while respecting privacy, comparing different interaction channels, network membership, and correlating organizational performance and creativity. It extends automatic visualization of social networks by mining communication archives such as e-mail and blogs through including analysis of the contents of those archives

Wearable sensors for pervasive healthcare management

We show that it is possible to identify individual personality traits and measure group performance in a Post-anesthesia Care Unit (PACU) using wearable sensors.We instrumented a group of 67 nurses working in the PACU of a Boston area hospital with sociometric badges capable of measuring physical activity, speech activity, face-to-face interaction, and physical proximity. Using the data collected with these sensors we were able to estimate the daily average length of stay (LOS) and number of delays.

Size Really Matters---New Insights for Start-ups' Survival

This paper presents new evidence regarding a firms probability for survival, based on the network structure of the firms managers. We found that start-ups that have larger informal communication networks increased their chance to survive external shock. Original data have been collected from Israeli software start-ups during the dot-com economic growth. About eight years later, we added information about their ability to survive the burst of the dot-com bubble. From a theoretical point of view, this paper highlights the power of the classic social networks approach in explaining organizational performance. From a practical point of view, these findings offer some guidelines for managers of start-ups. Our results show that the size of informal interfirm networks really matters.

Predicting Asset Value through Twitter Buzz

This paper describes early work trying to predict financial market movement such as gold price, crude oil price, currency exchange rates and stock market indicators by analyzing Twitter posts. We collected Twitter feeds for 5 months obtaining a large set of emotional retweets originating from within the US, from which six public opinion time series containing the keywords “dollar% t ”, “

CYBERMAP: yet another way of navigating in hyperspace

% t ”, “gold% t ”, “oil% t , “job% t ” and “economy% t ” were extracted. Our results show that these variables are correlated to and even predictive of the financial market movement. Except “

Social capital increases efficiency of collaboration among Wikipedia editors

% t ”, all other five public opinion time series are identified by a Granger-causal relationship with certain market movements. It is demonstrated that daily changes in the volume of economic topic retweeting seem to match the value shift occurring in the corresponding market next day.

VideoScheme: a programmable video editing systems for automation and media recognition

By integrating dynamic linking and automatic link generation into the automatic generation of an overview map we get a unique tool for navigation in hyperspace. We introduce the concept of HYPERDRAWERS to get a means for the partitioning of nodes in ordered sequences. CYBERMAP either complements existing navigational aids for hyperdocuments or provides a self sufficient navigation tool for browsing in a document. In addition CYBERMAP offers the capability of horizontal growth and easy hypertextualization of non-hypertextual documents without restricting the use of already installed browsing mechanisms besides CYBERMAP.