National Academies Selects Oded Nov for Keck Initiative

The annual National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) brings together some of the nation’s best researchers from academic, industrial, and government laboratories to explore and discover interdisciplinary connections in important areas of cutting-edge research.

Only about 100 attendees are invited each year, and Associate Professor Oded Nov of the Department of Technology Management and Innovation will be among them in November 2014, when the conference will center on collective behavior. Nov’s work focuses on social computing and explores the social dynamics that shape technology-enabled collaborations.

This year marks the second time Nov has been chosen for the honor: He participated in the 2012 NAKFI conference, entitled “The Informed Brain in a Digital World”-- and was subsequently awarded a grant for his pioneering work in examining the patterns through which individuals collaboratively create large scale repositories of knowledge.

Nov’s other laurels include a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Google Focused Research Award.

NAKFI -- whose mission is to foster cross-disciplinary interactions that transcend traditional borders, connecting otherwise thematically isolated scientists, engineers and doctors--is a program of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, with support from the W.M. Keck Foundation.