CASOS Ph.D. Student Proposal Competition

Computational analysis, data collection, and theory building are reshaping the social, organizational, information and policy sciences. As part of the CASOS program, we are encouraging students to engage in research projects in these areas. To promote high quality research in this area and to provide student with experience in the practical side of research - proposal writing, CASOS runs a Ph.D. student proposal competition. Ph.D. students are encouraged to write and submit proposals for funding in areas related to the computational social and organizational sciences. This funding can be used to supplement a current project or to engage in a new project. Team or group submissions are possible.

Proposals are encouraged in any of these, or related areas: Computational Organizational Theory, Computational Social Science, Computational Sociology, Computational Economics, Computational Policy Analysis, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Information Security, Perpetually Available Systems, Computational models or analysis of IT systems, Electronic Commerce, Graph and Network Algorithms, Network Statistics, Validation of computational models, Docking of computational models, and Social and Organizational Networks.

The topic of the proposal need not be related to the student's dissertation. Further two or more students may team up and generate a joint proposal on shared research.

Awardees will be asked to present the results of their project, the following summer, at the computational social and organizational conference at CMU. Relevant CASOS faculty will work with interested students to convert their CASOS proposal into a larger proposal to a standard funding agency.

Eligibility: Students must be enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon University and not be expected to graduate for at least 6 months. Preference is given to students who have completed their 1st and 2nd years of graduate study.

Proposal Contents: Cover page should contain: title, your name, department, email id, phone number, academic advisor, email id of academic advisor, total amount requested. Maximum of 3 pages, single spaced, 12 point times font, 1" margins (fingers, equations, code, and references are included in this limit; however the budget and cover page are not.).

Content should include:

  • Project description
  • Intellectual basis for project
  • Deliverables Timeline
  • Budget justification
  • 1 page budget. (Typical budgets are in the range of $500 to $2000.)

Due date:
Proposals are Due May 1, 2007.
Proposals will be read and reviewed at the end of January, May, and September of each year by a panel of CASOS faculty.

Past winners:

  • Ju-Sung Lee 2001 - Modeling Deviance Using Empirical Social Networks
  • Eleanor Lewis 2001 - The Impact of Speaker and Audience on Isomorphism in Written Organizational Accounts
  • Evelyn Barry 2000 - Software Volatility: A System-Level Measure
  • Carter Butts 2000 - Monte Carlo Methods for Simulating Large-Scale Interpersonal Networks

For additional information contact Prof. Kathleen M. Carley.

This proposal competition is sponsored by the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS).

©Copyright by CASOS