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 →

Tuja Khaund successfully defended her doctoral dissertation “Leveraging Social Network Analysis and Supervised Machine Learning to Study Coordination in Online Information Campaigns” Thursday, April 15, 2021. We wish her all the best for her future career at Walmart Inc. in Bentonville as a senior Data Scientist in the graph theory group.Read More →

In today’s interconnected world, the dissemination of information through social media has been unprecedented. Not all information posted and shared is truthful or unbiased. In recent years, social media platforms have been used by malicious actors or groups to misinform and manipulate thus threatening our society at large. Social media can be easily weaponized to sow discord, thus fomenting unrest amongst audiences with the intent to create behavior change. The latest IEEE Internet Computing special issue on cyber social health highlights developments of social media analytics used to gain a better understanding of online human behavior, as research in social media analytics has seen significantRead More →

Graduate student Adeola Adesoba has been selected as a winner of The New Face of Tech scholarship. The 1,000 Dreams Fund’s scholarship program aims to fund and fuel the aspirations of talented female college students pursuing careers in S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math). Adeola is one out of 40 selected winners chosen based on the quality of their submission, including a demonstrated commitment to their career dream in tech and a clear vision for how winning the New Face of Tech program will help them further accelerate progress towards their dream. “We are extremely proud of Adeola Adesoba for winning the prestigious andRead More →

COSMOS researchers earned the “Best Paper Award” for their submission “YouTube Video Categorization Using Moviebarcode” at the International Academy, Research, and Industry Association (IARIA) Conference on Human and Social Analytics (HUSO 2020), held in Porto, Portugal.  The paper written by Recep Erol, Rick Rejeleene, Richard Young, Thomas Marcoux, Dr. Muhammad Nihal Hussain, and Dr. Nitin Agarwal introduces the idea of utilizing moviebarcode, a technique used to summarize videos by compressing an entire video into a single image, to systematically categorize YouTube videos. “Moviebarcodes are typically used to visualize summary of videos,” stated lead author Recep Erol. “However, we used the color theory computationally so thatRead More →

COSMOS is pushing the boundaries of information behavior research with its new publication about the dark side of information operations, which is the negative phenomenon associated with the management of information in the online environment.  In the journal article “Combining advanced computational social science and graph theoretic techniques to reveal adversarial information operations” doctoral students Mustafa Alassad and Billy Spann and COSMOS director Dr. Nitin Agarwal introduce a method to identify malicious behavior and the actors responsible for propagating this behavior via online social networks. The researchers presented advanced socio-technical methods such as deviant cyber flash mob (DCFM) detection and focal structure analysis (FSA) thatRead More →

COSMOS began studying election-related social media content in 2019. To examine the possible use of a hostile online media campaign orchestrated to influence the 2019 Canadian Federal election, researchers used an in-house application called YouTubeTracker to collect more than 6,000 videos and more than one million comments. They combined multiple social media analysis techniques, social cyber forensic methods, content analysis, and mathematical-sociological constructs to determine whether online influence campaigns were orchestrated on YouTube.  “We have been extending our focus from blogs and Twitter to YouTube because the popular and interactive video sharing platform with more than one billion users has become a tool to spreadRead More →

We are pleased to announce that the paper “A Framework towards Computational Narrative Analysis on Blogs” written by Kiran Kumar Bandeli, Muhammad Nihal Hussain, and Nitin Agarwal has been published in The 3rd International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story’20) co-located with 42nd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2020). The paper introduces the idea of extracting narratives automatically on blogs to provide a better situational awareness. Narratives can be represented as semantic triplets of actors and their actions towards other actors. This is important because it provides sociologists/political scientists to gain situational awareness by tracking different opinions, political views, and narratives as theyRead More →

Joseph Kready and Thomas Marcoux won $10,000 by placing third in the Walton Family Foundation Graduate Division of the 20th annual Arkansas Governor’s Cup Collegiate Business Plan Competition. The duo competed as team Face-To-Face introducing an innovative technology that creates Avatar-based chatbots that replace existing text-based chatbot solutions. Face-to-Face is the first University of Arkansas at Little Rock team to place in the Graduate Division since 2009. This year, the competition was conducted with the help of videoconferencing technologies. 18 teams from eight Arkansas universities virtually presented their innovative ideas and business plan which were judged by volunteers from Arkansas’s private and public sector business,Read More →