keynote
Keynote Speakers: Agostino La Bella, Peter Gloor, Jana Diesner
Leadership, communication and charisma
agostino la bella
Leadership within social, economic and/or institutional organizations is generally perceived as the ability to influence and guide people without making use of hierarchical power. In spite of the importance given to this concept in the current organizational behavioral thinking, and the enormous literature on the subject, we are far from a universally accepted “leadership model” and its consequent prescriptions to follow in order to attain such a role. In this talk we will focus on charisma, one of the attributes that all great leaders possess. Literally meaning a “divine gift”, the term charisma has been used to indicate the ability to use symbols, emotions and ideologies to attract and inspire followers. On a wide scale it often assumes a heroic nature: the commander revered by his soldiers, the head of a fanatical group worshipped by his followers, the politician acclaimed by the cloud, the corporation head that becomes a worldwide symbol of his company’s products, the trade union leader that rouses the workers. However we are interested here in a more concrete and prosaic view of charisma, i.e. the ability of not going unnoticed, to command and maintain attention, to arouse positive emotions, to successfully uphold opinions, ideas, projects within the comparatively smaller context of our working, social and family relationships. In this frame we will show how individual charisma can be built using the several facets of interpersonal communication, focusing in particular on the conscious and subconscious mental processes that determine what is worth of attention. We will also describe possible performance measures for leadership at both the individual and organizational levels.
Agostino La Bella is full professor of Managerial Economics at “Tor Vergata” University in Rome, where he chairs the PhD Program in Business Engineering. He is founder and Head of “Executive Gate”, a MOOC portal devoted to executive education. He leads several research projects in the fields of organizational behavior, leadership and group dynamics, interpersonal and organizational communication, all focusing on exploring the underlying reasons for the way people feel, think and act both individually and while interacting with others. More information at http://agostinolabella.com.
Building Collective Consciousness - Homo Collaborensis
peter gloor
In his science fiction stories, Isaac Asimov predicts a future where our successors, bodiless and collectively intelligent, cohabit trillions of worlds in shared consciousness with universal artificial intelligence. While we are far away from this vision, the Internet, Google, and Wikipedia help us for the first time to combine individual realities into one global shared consciousness. This talk will describe, how, through the application of social quantum physics, we will become more collaborative, and what steps we can take today towards becoming “homo collaborensis”. “Honest signals of collaboration” consisting of words and visual cues, will lead through better communication to better collaboration, resulting in more innovation. These “honest signals ” will create entanglement between team members, who will – through understanding and visualizing these social cues – change their behavior towards better collaboration. In this sense their behavior of today will change their interpretation of the past, leading to a change in their future behavior. The six honest signals of collaboration are strong leadership, balanced contribution, rotating leadership, responsiveness, honest sentiment, and shared context. They will be described in detail, and illustrated with many practical examples. The talk will lay out what these signals mean for each of us, and what we can do to become better communicators, leading to becoming better collaborators, and thus ultimately become more creative, leading more fulfilling lives.
Peter A. Gloor is a Research Scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT's Sloan School of Management where he leads a project exploring Collaborative Innovation Networks. He is also Founder and Chief Creative Officer of software company galaxyadvisors, a Honorary Professor at University of Cologne, a lecturer at Aalto University in Helsinki, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at P. Universidad Católica de Chile. Earlier he was a partner with Deloitte and PwC, and a manager at UBS. He got his Ph.D in computer science from the University of Zurich and was a Post-Doc at the MIT Lab for Computer Science.
Words and Networks: Using Natural Language Processing to Enhance Graphs and Test Network Theories
jana diesner
The structure and dynamics of collaboration and communication networks are impacted by both social interactions and information exchange between people. In this talk, I present our research on using natural language processing techniques to enhance social network data. The ultimate goal with this work is to test the validity of classic social network theories in today’s contexts. I show our findings from leveraging sentiment analysis to label edges in communication networks in order to enable triadic balance assessment. In another example, we studied the homogeneity or diversity of clusters in networks with respect to basic principles of morality. I address methodological challenges, such as the validation and adaptation of lexical resources, and the directed nature of ties in communication networks. The presented methods enable the scalable and systematic detection of edge properties, which reduces the need for surveys or manual link labeling. Finally, I briefly discuss challenges in working with “open data” from online sources.
Jana Diesner is an Assistant Professor at the iSchool at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She is also an affiliate at the Department of Computer Science and a Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Jana’s research in social computing combines theories and methods from natural language processing, social network analysis and machine learning. In her lab, they develop and advance computational solutions that help people to measure and understand the interplay of information and socio-technical networks. They also bring these solutions into various application context, e.g. in the domain of impact assessment. For more information about Jana’s work see http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~jdiesner/.
