Internships are great opportunities for students, and they represent an invaluable turning point in their academic lives and overtime. They have provided a wealth of advantages for the COSMOS research team. Internship experiences allow students to approach issues from different perspectives, challenging preconceived notions and encouraging creative thinking. We are pleased to share the exciting news of cosmographers’ recent internships: several Cosmographers worked recently with renowned companies such as Amazon, Expedia, Intuit, Arkansas’s own Gainwell Technologies, and the Arkansas Department of Education. Through such internships, our cosmographers have been energized by the addition of new concepts, which promotes a vibrant, cooperative environment that fosters breakthroughs.Read More →

Being at the forefront of cutting-edge research, COSMOS publishes its research studies in leading international scientific forums. In this newsletter, we spotlight two of our recent publications, each using Agent-based Models (ABMs) to better understand social media behavior.  In the paper Developing an Agent-based Model to Minimize the Spreading of Malicious Information in Dynamic Social Networks published in the Springer Journal of Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory (CMOT), Mustafa Alassad and Nitin Agarwal look at agents in social media. In this research, the authors delve into the realm of misinformation and disinformation spread on social media platforms. They recognize the growing challenge of countering theRead More →

This summer school event is a yearly event that holds significant importance, as it is aimed at promoting AI applications in smart health, specifically in Arkansas and West Virginia. It is managed by two principal investigators, Dr. Nitin Agarwal in Arkansas and Dr. Donald Adjeroh in West Virginia, and it is funded by a $4 million NSF grant which was approved in 2018. This annual event gathers early career researchers, including undergraduates and graduates, from around the world. It unites not only computer scientists but also medical professionals from diverse specialties, advancing AI applications in smart health and healthcare research. The fourth annual WVAR-CRESH SummerRead More →

The SBP-BRiMS conference, which stands for Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation, is an interdisciplinary gathering that serves as a platform for researchers, experts, and scholars from various disciplines to come together and share their insights on topics related to computational social science, social computing, and behavior modeling. This annual event plays a crucial role in advancing the field by promoting collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas among researchers from different backgrounds. The SBP-BRiMS conference was founded by Professor Nitin Agarwal, and this was spurred from the realization of the need for an inclusive platform that allowed researchers toRead More →

Mainuddin Shaik has recently won both the DCSTEM Dean’s Elevator Speech Award and the DCSTEM Dean’s Cash Prize Award. “Winning awards like these has boosted my motivation and validated the hard work I was putting in,” says Shaik. “Now, it puts me in the mindset to achieve many more accomplishments than I had planned. Also, social networking in a research expo is pivotal as it encourages collaboration, fosters the exchange of ideas, and enhances visibility in the scientific community. It helped me build strong professional relationships, which can lead to new opportunities for research, funding, or career development opportunities. Ultimately, it contributed towards the progressRead More →

Last April, COSMOS student Mayor Inna Gurung won third place at the graduate poster competition at the annual DART conference in Arkansas, held on Thursday April 20th- 21st in Fayetteville. DART stands for Data Analytics that are Robust and Trusted (DART), which is a $24 million NSF EPSCOR grant awarded to Arkansas.   She discusses how her presentation helped her further her skills, saying, “I learned how to present the work in a way that anyone, from any field or from across disciplines, could understand my work.” This award highlights creating new solutions for issues in big data management, security and privacy, and model interpretability. Mayor’sRead More →

We are proud to announce that four Cosmographers have been selected for the 2023 Acxiom Diversity Scholarship program. This year’s Acxiom Diversity Scholarship award marks its 11th year as a program, which typically awards the scholarship to 10 students nationwide. Four of COSMOS students have won the scholarships this year, who are This scholarship provides $5,000 for US students from diverse backgrounds who are studying graduate or higher technology degrees full-time. Acxiom, based in Conway, encourages education in computer sciences, informational sciences, and mathematics & engineering. The initiative aims to decrease equality gaps by helping fund the education of the underprivileged and underrepresented. Below are their quotesRead More →

Several students from the COSMOS center have won awards for their research at the 2023 UALR Research Expo held on Friday, April 21st, 2023. Every year, UALR hosts its campus-wide Research and Creative Works Expo, celebrating students from all colleges and their unique research. More than 120 talented UA Little Rock students presented their work during the Student Research and Creative Works Expo on April 21! We are thrilled to share that, this year, several of our team members won awards at the Expo! These team members are: Ivory says, “I was grateful for the expo as it helped me look at my research fromRead More →

Being at the forefront of cutting-edge research, COSMOS publishes its research studies in leading international scientific forums. In the paper Examining Content and Emotion Bias in YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm published at the Ninth International Conference on Human and Social Analytics (HUSO 2023) in Barcelona, Spain, the authors, Ivory Okeke, Mert Can Cakmak, Billy Spann, and Nitin Agarwal look at bias in YouTube recommendations.  The study’s goal is to “explore YouTube’s video recommendation bias to determine if an inherent bias has an unintended impact of ‘hiding’ content related to vulnerable communities and minority groups,” said Ivory. The research found that “YouTube’s algorithm tends to recommend more videos whichRead More →

Dr. Nitin Agarwal, the Maulden-Entergy Chair and Distinguished Professor of Information Science and the founding director of COSMOS Research Center, has received a $95,227 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) flow-through from Arkansas Economic Development Commission’s (AEDC) Division of Science and Technology. Dr. Agarwal said, “the grant will help develop novel big data mining algorithms for a safer social media.” Online Social Networks (OSNs) have revolutionized how societies interact. While this new phenomenon in online socialization has brought the world closer, OSNs have also led to new vectors to facilitate cybercrime, cyberterrorism, cyberwarfare, and other deviant behaviors perpetrated by state/non-state actors. Due toRead More →