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Project Themes: Complex Social Systems Research Design and Methodology The Reality Mining Dataset Sociology in the 21st Century User Behavior Modeling and Prediction Relationship Inference Social Serendipity Organizational Dynamics Epidemiology and Information Dissemination Eigenbehaviors |
Organizational RhythmsTeam DynamicsBy continuously logging the people proximate to an individual, we are able to quantify a variety of properties about the individual's work group. Although most work in networks assumes a static topology, proximity network data is extremely dynamic and sparse. We are currently building generative models to attempt to parameterize the underlying dynamics of these networks to gain insight into the functionality of the group itself. Additionally, we hope that quantifying these proximity networks and contrasting the dynamics of the different groups at the Media Lab, we will gain some insight into the underlying characteristics of the research groups.
Organizational Modeling & RhythmsOrganizations have been considered microcosms of society, each with their own cultures and values [Wertheim (2003)]. Similar to society, organizational behavior often shows recurrent patterns despite being the sum of the idiosyncratic behavior of individuals [Begole et al. (2003)]. We are beginning to explore the dynamics of behavior in organizations in response to both external (stock market performance, a Red Sox World Series victory) and internal (deadlines, reorganization) stimuli.During October, the seventy-five Media Lab subjects had been working towards the annual visit of the laboratory's sponsors. Preparation for the upcoming events typically consumes most people's free time and schedules shift dramatically to meet deadlines and project goals. It has been observed that a significant fraction of the community tends to spend much of the night in the lab finishing up last minute details just before the event. We are beginning to uncover and model how the aggregate work cycles expand in reaction to these types of global deadlines. Figure 20 is a time series of the maximum number of links in the Media Lab proximity network during every one hour window. It can be seen that the number of links in the Media Lab proximity network remained significantly greater than zero during the third week of October and in early December, representing preparation for a large Media Lab sponsor event and MIT's finals week. A Fourier transform (Figure 20, bottom) of this times series uncovers two fundamental frequencies, the strongest being at 24 hours (1 day), and the second being at 168 hours (7 days).
© 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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