COSMOS Director Prof. Nitin Agarwal represented the University of Arkansas at Little Rock at the 17th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), held in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, contributing to a high-profile international panel on the growing influence of large language models (LLMs) on social networking and social media.

The panel, moderated by Rokia Missaoui (Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada), brought together leading experts from North America, Europe, and Asia, including Jean-Loup Guillaume (La Rochelle Université, France), Hongxin Hu (University at Buffalo, USA), Rasha Kashef (Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada), Kwan Hui Lim (Singapore University of Technology and Design), and Tamer Özsu (University of Waterloo, Canada).

Prof. Agarwal’s remarks focused on the transformative role of LLMs in shaping social media ecosystems, with particular attention to their impact across academia and industry. He highlighted both the positive potential—such as accelerating research, enhancing teaching and learning, and enabling advanced analytics in sectors like banking and e-commerce—and the risks, including manipulation, deception, bias, opacity, and adversarial misuse at scale.

Drawing on COSMOS’s long-standing research leadership in AI, social computing, and cognitive security, Prof. Agarwal emphasized critical challenges and design considerations for responsibly integrating LLMs into social network analysis and mining, including transparency, explainability, and human-AI collaboration. He also discussed emerging opportunities for using LLMs to query complex social media data and generate interpretable explanations, a key step toward trustworthy and actionable social media intelligence.

Participation in this panel underscores COSMOS’s growing global footprint and its role in advancing responsible, interdisciplinary AI research on the world stage.