Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge today announced a partnership with the University of Arkansas Little Rock (UALR) and the Arkansas Research Alliance to identify and track scam websites and social media misinformation related to COVID-19 that have rapidly spread with the pandemic.  Misinformation posted on websites and social media has been spreading quickly. False claims, misleading information and the sale of fake cures and treatments undermine Arkansas’ efforts to combat this disease and present a hazard to consumers’ physical, financial and online safety. The collaboration with COSMOS offers a new avenue to quickly identify the bad actors who want to spread misinformation or steal consumers’Read More →

Ph.D. candidate Adewale (Wale) Obadimu and graduate students Oluwaseun Johnson and Uche Umoga participated in the 2020 CRA URMD Grad Cohort Workshop which took place March 5-7, 2020 in Austin, Texas. The three-day event was hosted by the Computing Research Association (CRA), an organization dedicated to bringing industry, government and academia together to support research and advanced education in computing. This year, the CRA Grad Cohort for Underrepresented Minorities and Persons with Disabilities (URMD) Workshop took place for the third time, attracting students from schools across the United States and Canada. CRA covered the travel expenses for all selected students that collectively represent a diverseRead More →

Congratulations to Joseph Kready for being accepted to the 2020 Social Networks and Health Fellowship program at Duke University from May 11-15, 2020. The program is hosted by Duke Network Analysis Center (DNAC) and the Duke Population Research Institute, with support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Joseph will be participating in the week-long training course, covering a wide range of social network analysis topics related to studying health behaviors, including data collection, influence, network visualization, and agent-based modeling. He will be matched with a mentor, who will advise Joseph for a year to work on his ongoingRead More →

Muhammad Nihal Hussain successfully defended his doctoral dissertation “Role of Multiple Social Media Platforms in Online Campaigns.”  His committee consisted of Dr. Nitin Agarwal (chair), Dr. Samer Al-khateeb, Dr. Elizabeth Pierce, Dr. John Talburt, and Dr. Ningning Wu.  Hussain studied cross-media information dissemination, in which content posted on one platform is shared to another to boost visibility. During his time at COSMOS, he has analyzed information operations campaigns conducted against NATO exercises. Throughout these campaigns, information actors utilized several platforms to disseminate content.  “Most researchers focus on one platform to study disinformation, but dissemination strategies have evolved,” Hussain said. “Multiple social media platforms are usedRead More →

We are pleased to announce that Zachary Stine’s paper “Characterizing the language-production dynamics of social media users” has been published in the latest issue of Social Network Analysis and Mining, a multidisciplinary journal serving researchers and practitioners in academia and industry.    Abstract: In this paper, we propose a characterization of social media users based on language usage over time in order to make more rigorous the notions of organic and inorganic online behavior. This characterization describes the extent to which a user’s word usage within a particular time period subverts expectations based on preceding time periods. To do this, we adapt the use of anRead More →

Kiran Kumar Bandeli successfully defended his doctoral dissertation “A Framework Toward Computational Narrative Analysis on Blogs/Social Media” Monday, November 25, 2019.  In attendance were committee members Dr. Nitin Agarwal (chair), Dr. Elizabeth Pierce, Dr. John Talburt, and Dr. Ningning Wu as well as members of COSMOS.  During his time at COSMOS, Kiran quickly familiarize himself with blogs.  “Blogs in particular act as virtual spaces where narratives are framed. It is therefore important to study and understand the way information is said by the actors on social media platforms,” Kiran explained. Narratives are organized, long-lasting themes and ideas that persist in discourses. It is challenging toRead More →

Billy Spann successfully defended his master’s thesis “Structural Decomposition of Deviant Cyber Flash Mobs on Twitter Using Focal Structure Analysis” Friday, November 22, 2019.  In attendance were committee members Dr. Nitin Agarwal (chair), Dr. Elizabeth Pierce, and Dr. Dan Berleant as well as members of COSMOS.  Since he joined COSMOS in the summer of 2018, Billy has developed an interest in studying collection action groups. He familiarized himself with the deviant cyber flash mobs (DCFM) model developed by Dr. Samer Al-khateeb and Dr. Agarwal and used it as a stepping stone for his work.  The goal of his research was to use DCFM structural networkRead More →

Karen DiCicco successfully defended her master’s thesis “Blockchain Applications in Agriculture” Tuesday, November 19, 2019.  In attendance were committee members Dr. Nitin Agarwal (chair), Dr. Elizabeth Pierce, and Dr. Ningning Wu as well as members of COSMOS.  In December 2018, Karen graduated with her bachelor’s degree and Graduate Certificate in Data Science.  She will continue her research on blockchain applications as a University of Arkansas at Little Rock Information Science PhD student this Spring.    For more information about the Information Science programs offered, please visit https://ualr.edu/informationscience/. Read More →

United States Senator John Boozman visited UA Little Rock on Friday, November 15, 2019. He met with COSMOS director Dr. Nitin Agarwal and several researchers to gain insights about the work COSMOS is conducting.  COSMOS has been awarded a $2.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop ways to track emerging cyber-social threats and strengthen social cybersecurity research infrastructure. Dr. Agarwal presented his talk “Deviant Mobs of the Internet: Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures” during which he discussed how social media analytics research is used to track malicious activities, including the dissemination of propaganda, hoaxes, and disinformation to influence beliefs and behaviors. “WeRead More →