NICO Quarterly Newsflash - May 2021   RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT     Diversity can prevent failures in large power grids New research shows that there are stability benefits to heterogeneity in the power grid. Examining several power grids across the U.S. and Europe, a team led by Adilson Motter reported that generators operating on different frequencies return to their normal state more quickly when they are damped by “breakers” at different rates than generators around them. Read the article > How NICO faculty and collaborators are progressing to make the U.S. judicial system more accessible, user friendly and equitable In October 2019, with the help of NSF funding, the Systemic Content Analysis of Litigation Events Open Knowledge Network (SCALES-OKN) was launched with Luis Amaral and Adam Pah as Co-PIs. It has since grown to an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional group of more than 20 members spanning Northwestern and 7 other universities across the country. Read the article >     FEATURED EVENTS 5/26/21 - Wed@NICO - Neave O'Clery, University College London 5/26/21 - Data Science Nights w/ Brian Martin from Abbvie 6/14/21 - Summer Institute in Computational Social Science Chicago     IN THE NEWS - MEDIA HIGHLIGHTS Top of the Pops - Brian Uzzi, BBC Podcast, March 2021 How does science work? - Dashun Wang, Northwestern Now, March 2021 Three Students Awarded Prizes in the Great Math Challenge in Biology Contest - NICO Sponsored Event with the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology, February 2021 Network Canvas, a Free Suite of Tools for Network Data Collection, is Now Available for Use - Michelle Birkett, ISGMH, December 2020 Historical bias overlooks genes related to COVID-19 - Luis Amaral, Northwestern Now, November 2020     THE NICO NETWORK “One of the things that we learned very, very quickly, and very early on, was that designing algorithms that are useful for people involves a lot more than just data and code.” - NICO and Amaral Lab Alumni Dean Malmgren, Executive Portfolio Director at IDEO. Dean founded DataScope Analytics (later purchased by IDEO) while a graduate student at Northwestern. Listen to Dean on the Experiencing Data Podcast. Congratulations to Kat Albrecht! Starting in August, Kat will be a tenure track Assistant Professor in the Criminology and Criminal Justice Department at Georgia State University. She is currently a JD/PhD Candidate in Sociology at Northwestern and a long time NICO collaborator, organizing the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science Chicago since 2018 and also speaking at one of our monthly Data Science Nights.     WE WANT YOU NICO’s Quarterly Newsflash provides insights about the Northwestern ecosystem of data science, network science, and complex systems with the aim of sparking innovation and collaboration in our community. Please contact us to share ideas for new content, recommend speakers for Wednedays@NICO or Data Science Nights, or tell us what you love or what we can do better!     Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems 600 Foster Street, Evanston, IL 60208 (847) 491-2527 To manage your subscription to the NICO Listserv, please login to NUIT or reply with "SUBSCRIBE" or "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line.