Noshir Contractor

Northwestern University | NU · Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences

In this study, we examined the impact of recommendation systems' algorithms on individuals' collaborator choices when forming teams. Different algorithmic designs can lead individuals to select one collaborator over another, thereby shaping their teams' composition, dynamics, and performance. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a 2 x 2 between-su...

System design has been facing the challenges of incorporating complex dependencies between individual entities into design formulations. For example, while the decision-based design framework successfully integrated customer preference modeling into optimal design, the problem was formulated from a single entity's perspective, and the competition b...

Network-based analyses have shown their effectiveness in understanding customer preferences through interactions and relationships between customers and products, particularly for tailored product design. There is limited research on applying this analysis to diverse customers with varied preferences. This paper introduces a market-segmented networ...

Thriving at work is closely related to the way employees are embedded in their social contexts, such as the structure of their communication relations with coworkers. In previous research, communication relations have been found to negatively relate to thriving at work. However, social network theory suggests that communication relations are benefi...

This paper presents the data collection method and introduces the dataset about consumers’ consider-then-choose behaviors in the household vacuum cleaner market. First, we designed a questionnaire that collected participants’ consideration and choice data, social network data, demographic information, and preferences for product features. In additi...

This paper addresses the need for theoretical advancements in understanding team processes and the impact of technology on teams. Specifically, it examines the use of digital collaboration technologies by organizational teams and their effect on team communication and collaboration. Using the concept of affordances as a theoretical lens, the paper...

Customer preference modelling has been widely used to aid engineering design decisions on the selection and configuration of design attributes. Recently, network analysis approaches, such as the exponential random graph model (ERGM), have been increasingly used in this field. While the ERGM-based approach has the new capability of modelling the eff...

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) promise a future where teams consist of people and intelligent machines, such as robots or virtual agents. In order for human-AI teams (HATs) to succeed, human team members will need to be receptive to their new AI counterparts. In this study, we draw on a tripartite model of human newcomer receptivity, whic...

Despite the importance of diverse expertise in helping solve difficult interdisciplinary problems, measuring it is challenging and often relies on proxy measures and presumptive correlates of actual knowledge and experience. To address this challenge, we propose a text-based measure that uses researcher’s prior work to estimate their substantive ex...

Despite the recognized need to prepare for a future of human-AI collaboration, the technical skills necessary to develop and deploy AI systems are considerable, making such research difficult to perform without specialized knowledge. To make human-AI collaboration research more accessible, we developed a novel experimental method that combines a st...

Previous research shows that teams with diverse backgrounds and skills can outperform homogeneous teams. However, people often prefer to work with others who are similar and familiar to them and fail to assemble teams with high diversity levels. We study the team formation problem by considering a pool of individuals with different skills and chara...

Objective: The aim of this study was to examine how task, social, and situational factors shape work patterns, information networks, and performance in spaceflight multiteam systems (MTSs). Background: Human factors research has explored the task and individual characteristics that affect decisions regarding when and in what order people complet...

Trellis is a mobile platform created by the Human Nature Lab at the Yale Institute for Network Science to collect high-quality, location-aware, off-line/online, multi-lingual, multi-relational social network and behavior data in hard-to-reach communities. Respondents use Trellis to identify their social contacts by name and photograph, a procedure...

Self-reported social network analysis studies are often complex and burdensome, both during the interview process itself, and when conducting data management following the interview. Through funding obtained from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA/NIH), our team developed the Network Canvas suite of software – a set of complementary tools t...

A key function of team leadership is building and sustaining shared mental models. Topological approaches to leadership identify structural patterns, such as decentralized and shared leadership that empower members to collectively lead themselves toward important goals, but an open question is the particular form of leadership that best promotes te...

Statistical network models have been used to study the competition among different products and how product attributes influence customer decisions. However, in existing research using network-based approaches, product competition has been viewed as binary (i.e., whether a relationship exists or not), while in reality, the competition strength may...

Teammate invitation networks are foundational for team assembly, and recommender systems (similar to dating websites, but for selecting potential teammates) can aid the formation of such networks. This paper extends Hinds et al.’s (2000) influential model of team member selection by incorporating online recommender systems. Exponential random graph...

ACCESS—the Agent-based Causal simulator with Cognitive, Environmental, and Social System factors—is an agent-based simulation of an alternate world that is designed to test social science methodologies’ abilities to explain, predict, and prescribe policies for complex social systems. The ACCESS world model includes behaviors based on behavioral and...

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has prompted an unprecedented shift to remote work. Workers across the globe have used digital technologies to connect with teammates and others in their organizations. In what ways did the COVID-19 crisis alter the frequency and balance of internal and external team interactions? During a crisis, network...

Gold farming and real money trade refer to a set of illicit practices in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) whereby players accumulate virtual resources to sell for “real world” money. Prior work has examined trade relationships formed by gold farmers but not the trust relationships which exist between members of these organizations. We ado...

Self-reported social network analysis studies are often complex and burdensome, both during the interview process itself, and when conducting data management following the interview. Through funding obtained from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA/NIH), our team developed the Network Canvas suite of software – a set of complementary tools t...

Trellis is a mobile platform created by the Human Nature Lab at the Yale Institute for Network Science to collect high-quality, location-aware, off-line/online, multi-lingual, multi-relational social network and behavior data in hard-to-reach communities. Respondents use Trellis to identify their social contacts by name and photograph, a procedure...

Choice modeling is important in transportation planning, marketing and engineering design, as it can quantify the influence of product attributes and customer demographics on customers’ choice behaviors. Consumer studies suggest that customers’ choice-making process often consists of two different stages: customers first consider subsets of availab...

Social network data collected from digital sources is increasingly used to gain insights into human behavior. However, while these observable networks constitute an empirical ground truth, the individuals within the network can perceive the network's structure differently-and they often act on these perceptions. As such, we argue that there is a di...

It has been the historic responsibility of the social sciences to investigate human societies. Fulfilling this responsibility requires social theories, measurement models and social data. Most existing theories and measurement models in the social sciences were not developed with the deep societal reach of algorithms in mind. The emergence of ‘algo...

What traits make users appealing as potential teammates? How do the traits that users seek out in teammates stay constant and differ as the task changes? Our study explores the social networks and skills involved in teammate selection. We performed a quasi-experimental study to analyze teammate choices for three tasks: launching a start-up, survivi...

Previous research shows that diverse teams in background and skills can outperform homogeneous teams. However, people often prefer to work with others who are similar and familiar and fail to assemble teams with high diversity levels. We propose a team formation algorithm that suggests diverse teams based on individuals’ social networks, allowing t...

Abundant research supports a cognitive foundation to teamwork. Team cognition describes the mental states that enable team members to anticipate and to coordinate. Having been examined in hundreds of studies conducted in board rooms, cockpits, nuclear power plants, and locker rooms, to name a few, we turn to the question of moderators: Under which...

Group or collective identity is an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution. There are many different contexts in which collective identity operates, and a host of application domains where collective identity is important. Collective identity is studied across myriad acade...

There is large interest in networked social science experiments for understanding human behavior at-scale. Significant effort is required to perform data analytics on experimental outputs and for computational modeling of custom experiments. Moreover, experiments and modeling are often performed in a cycle, enabling iterative experimental refinemen...

The emergence of team-assembly technologies has brought with it new challenges in designing and implementing socio-technical systems. Our understanding of how systems shape the team-assembly processes is still limited. How do systems enable users to find teammates? How do users make decisions when using these systems? And what factors explain the c...

BACKGROUND The communication delays involved in long-distance space missions are a major challenge for effective information sharing within a large network including space crews and mission support. Effective information sharing requires team members, both crews and mission support, to leverage not only their direct contacts but also their indirect...

We introduce and describe the Patent Similarity Dataset, comprising vector space model‐based similarity scores for U.S. utility patents. The dataset provides approximately 640 million pre‐calculated similarity scores, as well as the code and computed vectors required to calculate further pairwise similarities. In addition to the raw data, we introd...

Data sharing, research ethics, and incentives must improve

This study examines the processes of complex innovation adoption in an interorganizational system. It distinguishes the innovation adoption mechanisms of organizational-decision-makers (ODMs), who make authority adoption decisions on behalf of an organization, from individual-decision-makers (IDMs), who make optional innovation decisions in their o...

This paper examines the stability of egocentric networks as reported over time using a novel touchscreen-based participant-aided sociogram. Past work has noted the instability of nominated network alters, with a large proportion leaving and reappearing between interview observations. To explain this instability of networks over time, researchers of...

Despite the benefits of team diversity, individuals often choose to work with similar others. Online team formation systems have the potential to help people assemble diverse teams. Systems can connect people to collaborators outside their networks, and features can quantify and raise the salience of diversity to users as they search for prospectiv...

Understanding the impact of engineering design on product competitions is imperative for product designers to better address customer needs and develop more competitive products. In this paper, we propose a dynamic network-based approach for modeling and analyzing the evolution of product competitions using multi-year buyer survey data. The product...

We demonstrate an approach to perform significance testing on the association between two different network-level properties, based on the observation of multiple networks over time. This approach may be applied, for instance, to evaluate how patterns of social relationships within teams are associated with team performance on different tasks. We a...

Which individuals in a network make the most appealing teammates? Which invitations are most likely to be accepted? And which are most likely to be rejected? This study explores the factors that are most likely to explain the selection, acceptance, and rejection of invitations in self-assembling teams. We conducted a field study with 780 participan...

The widespread availability of digital trace data provides new opportunities for researchers to understand human behaviors at a large scale. Sequences of behavior, captured when individuals interface with an information system, can be analyzed to uncover behavioral trends and tendencies. Rather than assume homogeneity among actors, in this study we...

Team assembly refers to the process of creating a team of collaborators. Scientific factors, such as the question of what expertise is needed to address the scientific goals, are critical to team assembly. However, so are a wide range of interpersonal and intrapersonal factors. This chapter will discuss the variety of factors to consider when assem...

The field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has an enduring interest in studying and designing technologies that bring people together in partnerships, teams, crowds, communities, and other collectives. As the technologies enabling group formation have evolved, so too have the guiding questions pursued by CSCW scholars. This review outl...

This article reviews the opportunities and challenges for computational research methods in the field of communication. Among the social sciences, communication stands out as a discipline with a relatively low-profile institutionalized focus on the in-house development of methods. Computational tools are changing this, and they are catalyzing a new...

There is a long-recognized literature on the importance of knowledge networks and their potential for knowledge creation and diffusion. Traditional econometrics techniques used to examine knowledge spillovers in alliance networks are designed with an intrinsic assumption of independence among observations. These approaches unrealistically assume th...

Understanding the impact of engineering design on product competitions is imperative for product designers to better address customer needs and develop more competitive products. In this paper, we propose a dynamic network based approach to modeling and analyzing the evolution of product competitions using multi-year product survey data. We adopt S...

Customer preference modeling provides quantitative assessment of the effects of engineering design attributes on customers’ choices. Utility-based approaches, such as discrete choice model (DCM), and network analysis approaches, such as exponential random graph model (ERGM), have been developed for customer preference modeling. However, no studies...

This study explores how and why scholars find collaborators using team formation systems. Based on theories of teams and human and social capital, we describe how scholars’ traits and social networks influence their team formation processes. We conducted a field study in Argentina in which 43 scholars used an online platform and assembled into eigh...

Space crews venturing beyond low Earth orbit will experience unprecedented levels of autonomy and unpredictable challenges. Mission success will require effective teamwork. How do teamwork capabilities change over time in isolation and confinement? To explore this question, 4, 4-member crews who participated in the 30-day campaign of the National A...

People and organizations are increasingly using online platforms to assemble teams. In response, HCI researchers have theorized frameworks and created systems to support team assembly. However, little is known about how users search for and choose teammates on these platforms. We conducted a field study where 530 participants used a team formation...

In the version of this article initially published, errors occurred in the Acknowledgments.