Registration is now open for the 8th annual CASOS Summer Institute.

Meeting dates:  23 - 29 June 2008; Monday - Sunday (7 days).
Location: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Instructional Faculty:   Kathleen M. Carley, David Krackhardt, & Lee 
Wagenhals, & others

Note: Since, historically, the Summer Institute becomes fully booked, 
you should register early!

Curriculum:
The hands-on curriculum builds on both social network and computational 
analysis techniques, and illustrates how to use these techniques to 
study social, organizational and policy issues.

Topics Covered Include:
  Social Network Analysis
  Dynamic Network Analysis (multi-mode, multi-network)
  Link analysis
  Network grouping techniques - Cliques, fuzzy groups, Newman-Girvan
  Unstructured text extraction to network representation, and analysis 
techniques
  Basic Approach to building and evaluating multi-agent simulation systems
  Simulation model validation and docking
  Hands-on introduction to CASOS tools: ORA, AutoMap, and Construct

The purpose of the CASOS Summer Institute is to provide an intense and 
hands-on introduction to dynamic network analysis and computational 
modeling of complex socio-technical systems. Both network analysis and 
multi-agent modeling will be covered. Participants will be able to 
complete the institute without programming skills or in-depth 
understanding of particular social theories.

Participants learn about current trends, practices, and tools available 
for social networks analysis, link analysis, simulation, and multi-agent 
modeling. Basic social network and dynamic network representations, 
statistics, analysis and visualization techniques are covered. 
Techniques for designing, analyzing, and validating computational models 
with and without network components are presented. There is also an 
emphasis on appropriate and inappropriate ways to critique computational 
models and network analyses. The strengths and weaknesses of 
computational and network approaches to examining complex 
socio-technical issues are discussed. Multiple computational platforms 
are explored and hands-on experience are provided. An examination of 
social network methods, complexity theory and procedures for integrating 
network-based metrics and statistics into computational models completes 
the program.

The software tools students will learn and work with include: ORA, 
AutoMap, and Construct, which are network analysis, information 
extraction, and simulations tools, respectively, that are developed at 
CASOS and widely used globally in business, government, and education.

Students are encouraged to bring their own data and to learn to use the 
CASOS tools to code, analyze, reason about and visualize there data. 
Hands-on instruction and assistance will be provided on how to import 
data to ORA from CSV files, SQL databases, email servers, UCINET 
formats, PenLink, I2/Analyst Notebook and other raw data formats. 
Students will work through a tool chain where they extract networks from 
texts, analyze those networks, and the using simulation techniques 
evolve those networks.

For more information and details, see the Summer Institute website:    
http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/events/summer_institute/2008/

Terrill Frantz
Carnegie Mellon University
SCS/ISR/CASOS