SoCS: Analyzing Partially Observable Computer-Adolescent Networks

同龄人是青少年，即11至17岁青年生活中强有力的社交媒介。几十年来的社会学、心理学和犯罪学文献发现，青少年的攻击性（例如，欺凌、打架）和少年犯罪（例如，逃学、破坏公物、酗酒和吸毒）主要取决于青年人在一个人的主要友谊中的行为。近年来，青少年网络中的计算机参与越来越多，从而产生了新的群体动力学和新的机会来研究群体互动和个人偏好，这里提出的工作将开发算法和方法，从个人的部分观察推断青少年网络结构。它将利用从小型中学收集的信息来推断更大规模学生群体的信息。PI将创建一组用于课堂的游戏，这些游戏将为这项研究收集数据，同时还提供有关课堂动态的信息。通过这些游戏收集的数据集将与以前的方法进行比较。这项研究对广泛的学科有潜在的影响。在确定青少年网络结构方面的创新将有助于更好地估计同龄人在青少年危险行为率上升中的作用。计算机科学专家和心理学专家之间的智力伙伴关系代表了将创新的计算思维带入更好地理解现实世界重要问题的重要一步，如青少年攻击和犯罪。

Peers are powerful socializing agents in the lives of adolescents, that is, youth between the ages of 11 to 17 years. Decades of sociological, psychological, and criminological literature have found that youth aggression (e.g., bullying, fighting) and delinquency (e.g., truancy, vandalism, alcohol and drug use) are predominately determined by the behaviors of youth in one's primary friendship. Computer involvement in adolescent networks is growing in recent years, giving rise to new group dynamics and new opportunities to study group interactions and individual preferences.The work proposed here will develop algorithms and methodologies for inferring adolescent network structure from partial observations about individuals. It will take information collected from small middle schools to infer information about larger groups of students. The PIs will create a set of games for use in the classroom that would collect data for this research while also providing information about class dynamics. The data sets collected through those games will be compared with previous approaches.This research has potential impact on a wide range of disciplines. Innovations in identifying adolescent network structures will allow better estimation of the role of peers in the rising rates of risky adolescent behaviors. The intellectual partnership between an expert in computer science and one in psychology represents an important step in bringing innovative computational thinking to better understand issues of real-world significance such as youth aggression and delinquency.