The Team Engineering Collaboratory (TECLAB) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was established in 1994 to investigate the coevolution of knowledge networks and 21st century organizational forms, with a special emphasis on the development of theory, empirical analysis, and computational modeling. It is housed in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Projects in the lab investigate the dynamics of knowledge and communication networks in a wide spectrum of organizations including private, public, non-governmental, and multinational organizations. TECLAB research is part of the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary effort to explain and predict the evolution of knowledge networks and network organizations.

The Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group was founded in 2004 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications as part of its effort to enable the next-generation cyber-infrastructure.  A major challenge in successful development, deployment, and growth of cyber-infrastructure to support communities is developing a principled methodology to measure, mobilize, and modify the social and knowledge networks of the individuals that comprise these communities. SONIC will develop a computationally intensive methodology that has as a dual focus: (i) advancing the basic science of social networks in communities and (ii) designing, developing, and deploying a more general-purpose suite of web-based social and knowledge networking tools to enable and empower communities using the next generation cyber-infrastructure.