Along with the excellent collaborators listed below, I have been funded by NSF for a project entitled Collaborative Research: From Brains to Society: Neural Underpinnings of Collective Behaviors Via Massive Data and Experiments. Apart from the topic, an interesting point about this project is how it arose. NSF advertised an Ideas Lab on “Harnessing the Data Revolution”. Those selected (from a very lightweight application) were sequestered in a hotel near Washington DC in late May, and cleverly guided by professional facilitators to form groups, and propose projects. Since the participants were chosen not to know each other already, this was an intense and at times stressful exercise. Somehow I became involved in an interesting project that differs considerably from my initial ideas, with collaborators Caterina Stamoulis (neuroscience, Harvard), Jie Gao (CS, Stony Brook), Brandon Behlendorf (sociology, Albany), Prodromos Daoutidis (engineering, Minnesota) and Brandon Sepulvado (sociology, NORC). I highly recommend the Ideas Lab experience, which is different from any other grant-related experience I have had.