SLIS Associate Professor of Information Science Katy Brner has been awarded a $1.2M grant by the NSF and a $420,000 grant by the James S. McDonnell Foundation.
The NSF grant will fund the development of a NetWorkBench: A Large-Scale Network Analysis, Modeling and Visualization Toolkit for Biomedical, Social Science and Physics Research. Brner's co-researchers include Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, of the University of Notre Dame; Santiago Schnell and Alessandro Vespignani, of the IU School of Informatics; Stanley Wasserman, of the IU Department of Psychology; and Craig Stewart, acting associate vice president for research and academic computing at IU.
According to the abstract, "This project will design, evaluate, and operate a unique distributed, shared resources environment for large-scale network analysis, modeling, and visualization, named NetWorkBench (NWB). The envisioned data-code-computing resources environment will provide a one-stop online portal for researchers, educators, and practitioners. [It] will speed up and ease network science applications and education in biology, social and behavioral science, and large infrastructure analysis, thereby accelerating the rate of scientific discovery."
The McDonnell Foundation grant on Modeling the Structure and Evolution of Scholarly Knowledge will allow Brner and co-investigator Robert Gladstone, an IU psychology professor, to study science using a complex systems approach. The project's goal is to develop and validate agent-based, computational models that describe the dynamically evolving structure of scholarly knowledge ecologies.
"In particular," said Brner, "we are interested in analyzing and modeling the co-evolution of author and paper networks, the merging and splitting of existing scientific topics, the emergence of novel topics, the diffusion of reputations, and also the diffusion of scientific concepts via co-authorship and via the production and consumption of papers."
Posted June 28, 2005