Noshir Contractor Part of Two New Network Science Centers

Noshir Contractor, the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, will receive more than $1.3 million in funding as part of his work with two new centers funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory that will form a new Collaborative Technology Alliance (CTA) in the area of network science.

Contractor is involved with the Information Network Academic Research Center (INARC) at the University of Illinois' Department of Computer Science. INARC received $16.75 million to address the research challenges inherent in complex, mobile, self-forming, and rapidly-changing networks such as those utilized on the battlefield by the Army and its soldiers.

Contractor is also part of a center run by BBN Technologies, a high-tech research and development company. That center, the Integrated Research Center, will evaluate and leverage research from the other three centers (which include Social Cognitive Networks Research Center led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Communication Networks Research Center led by Pennsylvania State University, as well as other research entities.)

Taken as a whole, the collaborative alliance represents "the first project looking at the social interaction, information distribution, and mobile ad-hoc network as a whole...combining three previously disparate intellectual pursuits," said Jay Gowens, ARL's CISD director.