Rutherford, A., Cebrian, M., Dsouza, S., Moro, E., Pentland, A., Rahwan, I. (2013) "Limits of Social Mobilization", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The PNAS paper is finally out, with me as third author. All of us are elated, of course, as PNAS is one of the top scientific publications. This project has also been the subject of a 2012 NetSci conference presentation and a 2012 WIDS workshop poster, so our team has been into it for a while now.

Masdar Press Release:

Abu Dhabi-UAE: 18 April, 2013 – Time-critical social mobilization is the ability of social networks to mobilize rapidly to address challenges such as disaster response or finding a missing child.

While social media is a very effective tool for mobilizing volunteers, it still has its limits, according to a research paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) journal, considered the second most-cited scientific journal in the world.

The scientific paper is a result of two years of research at the Social Computing and Artificial Intelligence laboratory, led by Dr. Iyad Rahwan, Associate Professor and Head of Computing & Information Science at Masdar Institute of Science and Technology.

The first author of the paper is Dr Alex Rutherford, post-doctoral fellow at Masdar Institute and member of Dr. Rahwan’s lab. The other co-authors are Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dr. Manuel Cebrian, from National ICT Australia, Sohan D’Souza of Masdar Institute, and Prof. Esteban Moro, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

We also got got coverage at LiveScience.com and Phys.org.