Helpful interactions can keep societies stable

New work by Erol Akçay challenges 50-year-old predictions that mutualistic interactions make a community unstable. His work shows that mutualism is compatible with stable communities and that the balance of mutualism with other types of interactions plays determinative roles in the makeup, size, and stability of those communities.

Biology

Consensus and Contagion in Society

How to Build an Ethical Algorithm

Algorithms determine a huge amount about the way we live and work online. They determine what we see online and can tell us what type of healthcare we're going to get. On a recent episode of Fast Forward, Michael Kearns explains how AI systems will change the world for the better—if we design them the right way.

Computer and Information Science

Social Norms for Algorithms

Illuminating interactions between decision-making and the environment

In a new publication in Nature Communications, Erol Akçay presents a unifying game theory model describing the feedbacks that occur between strategic decision making and environmental change captured dynamics that occur in fisheries, in human social interactions, in soil-microbe interactions, and much more.

Biology

Consensus and Contagion in Society

Lyle Ungar Named AAAS Leshner Public Engagement Fellow

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has selected twelve researchers in the area of AI as the 2020–2021 Alan I. Leshner Leadership Institute Public Engagement Fellows. Lyle Ungar is being recognized for his work using machine learning and text mining on social media messages to study physical and mental health.

Computer and Information Science

New Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, & Mixed Methodologies

Ezekiel Dixon-Román and others recently announced the launch of the Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, & Mixed Methodologies. The training institute is designed for scholars from underrepresented backgrounds as well as for scholars doing critical research on communities of color.

Social Policy

Weijie Su named 2020 Sloan Research Fellow

Weijie Su, Assistant Professor of Statistics, is among the 126 recipients of the 2020 Sloan Research Fellowship. The award recognizes early-career researchers and scholars in the United States and Canada, and each recipient will receive a two-year, $70,000 Fellowship for their research.

Statistics

Co-Edited by Professor González-Bailón, New Book Features Work By Penn Faculty and Alumni

Oxford University Press has published The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication, which is co-edited by Sandra González-Bailón. This handbook brings together scholars across the social and technological sciences to lay the foundations of communication research in the networked age.

Communication

Consensus and Contagion in Society

Is Streaming the Future of TV Programming?

Raghu Iyengar joined the Wharton Business Daily podcast to talk about the complex market for streaming services, the challenges that come with continually creating fresh, new content, and the future of TV programming.

Marketing

Ubiquity of Data

Science Magazine’s favorite photos of 2019

Curated from the thousands of photos that graced their website and magazine in 2019, Science Magazine chronicled their favorite photos of the year. Included in the top 20 is a photo of Danielle Bassett standing near her lab’s representation of the brain’s structural connections, which was made from MRI data.

Bioengineering
Electrical and Systems Engineering

How biology creates networks that are cheap, robust, and efficient

A new study in Physical Review Letters from Eleni Katifori shows how a wide variety of vascular networks can be created by changing only a small number of a network’s attributes.

Physics and Astronomy

Ubiquity of Data

News

Helpful interactions can keep societies stable

How to Build an Ethical Algorithm

Illuminating interactions between decision-making and the environment

Lyle Ungar Named AAAS Leshner Public Engagement Fellow

New Institute in Critical Quantitative, Computational, & Mixed Methodologies

Weijie Su named 2020 Sloan Research Fellow

Co-Edited by Professor González-Bailón, New Book Features Work By Penn Faculty and Alumni

Is Streaming the Future of TV Programming?

Science Magazine’s favorite photos of 2019

How biology creates networks that are cheap, robust, and efficient