Carnegie Mellon University
June 04, 2010

CASOS hosts 10th annual Summer Institute

The Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) is hosting its 10th annual Summer Institute, an intense, hands-on introduction to dynamic network analysis and computational modeling of complex socio-technical systems.

This world-renowned institute each year brings together brings together about 50 participants from around the globe in the business, the military, and academia domains. Participants learn about the latest trends and tools for social network analysis and network science. These tools are being used to address a growing number of real-world problems, such as improving the organizational structure of corporations, destabilizing urban gangs or terrorist groups and supporting crisis response efforts.

CASOS Director Kathleen M. Carley, professor of computation, organization and society in the Institute for Software Research, and Jeffrey Johnson, a professor of sociology at East Carolina University, are the core faculty. Additional instruction is provided by CASOS research staff and senior Ph.D. students. The institute will be in the Singleton Room of Roberts Engineering Hall June 7-13. Participants will learn how to use ORA, AutoMap, and Construct, which are network analysis, information extraction, and simulation tools, respectively, that have been developed at CASOS and are widely used globally in business, government, and education. Participants are encouraged to bring their own data to the institute so they can use these tools to analyze and visualize it.

The CASOS summer institute started as a small summer program, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Integrated Graduate Education and Research Program, for Ph.D. students at other universities to come to Carnegie Mellon to learn about the advances in network analytics being made in CASOS. The increasing interest in network analytics and human social modeling led to demand for a similar program for corporate and government personnel. Today, the CASOS summer institute is the largest and longest-standing immersive training program in the U.S. where participants can get practical training in how to collect, analyze and forecast behavior using dynamic social network techniques.

CASOS is housed in the School of Computer Science’s Institute for Software Research and includes faculty, students and staff from across the university, including the Carnegie Institute of Technology, the Tepper School of Business, the Heinz College and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.