The National Internet Observatory (NIO) is an NSF-funded
infrastructure project aimed to help researchers study online behavior.
Participants install a browser extension and/or mobile apps to donate
their online activity data along with comprehensive survey responses.
The infrastructure, located at Northeastern University, will offer
approved researchers access to a suite of structured, parsed content
data for selected domains to enable analyses and understanding of
Internet use in the US. This is all conducted within a robust research
ethics framework, emphasizing ongoing informed consent, and multiple
layers, technical and legal, of interventions to protect the values at
stake in data collection, data access, and research.
This talk
will provide a brief overview of the contemporary need to build shared
infrastructure for studying the internet, discuss the details of the NIO
infrastructure, the data collected, the participants, and the
researcher intake process.
Bio:
David
Lazer is a University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and
Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, and Co-Director, NULab for
Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science. Prior to coming to
Northeastern University, he was on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy
School (1998-2009). In 2019, he was elected a fellow to the National
Academy of Public Administration. His research has been published in
such journals as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science, the American Political Science Review, Organization Science,
and the Administrative Science Quarterly, and has received extensive
coverage in the media, including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington
Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS Evening News.
He is among
the leading scholars in the world on misinformation and computational
social science and has served in multiple leadership and editorial
positions, including as a board member for the International Network of
Social Network Analysts (INSNA), reviewing editor for Science, associate
editor of Social Networks and Network Science, numerous other editorial
boards and program committees.
Sponsorship of an event does not constitute institutional endorsement of external speakers or views presented.
