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 →

Richard Young successfully defended his information science master’s project “Chromaweaver: A Moviebarcode Analysis Tool for Youtube” Friday, November 8, 2019.  In attendance were committee members Dr. Nitin Agarwal (chair), Dr. Bruce Bauer and Dr. Joseph Williams as well as members of COSMOS. Richard is a remote student currently living in Spain and did his defense via Google Hangout.  For his project, Richard explored moviebarcode image processing techniques that can be integrated into the COSMOS application YoutubeTracker. The end result is the standalone application Chromaweaver, which serves as a moviebarcode analysis tool for Youtube videos. Richard documented his work for the project as a blog. BeingRead More →

Ph.D. candidate Adewale (Wale) Obadimu participated in the 2019 CRA URMD Grad Cohort Workshop which took place March 22-23, 2019 in Waikoloa, Hawaii.  The two-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 attracted twice the amount of participants than the inaugural workshop in 2018. CRA covered the travel expenses for all selected students that collectively represent a diverse set of computing-related research areas and institutions. 158 accepted applicants from 78Read More →

Innovative ideas paired with the newest technology is an ideal match made right here in Little Rock, Arkansas. The ideas stem from Karen Watts, a COSMOS researcher and the new digital and innovation manager for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. She is using synergistic technology to improve farming. “I love learning about emerging technologies and I get to learn the newest technologies every day,” said Watts who draws similarities between her job and hackathons. “I look to see what works, develop a proof of concept and prototype the new technology for us. It’s going to put us ahead in innovation.” Watts hasRead More →

It was a sunny Friday afternoon.  Students rushed out of Alice Drive Middle School in Sumter, SC, ready to start their weekend.  15 students stayed behind. Laughter filled the classroom as they were getting ready for their club meeting. Their club is officially called the Science Fiction and Fantasy Federation, short SF3.  Their weekly two-hour club meetings are providing them with a creative outlet for their diverse interests in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, and fandom genres. This may all sound like fun and games, which is certainly part of the club activities, but club members don’t simply chat for two hours about theRead More →

With the start of the Spring semester, life on campus has become more active again.  The calm during the break is over. Classes are in full swing and so are activities. One of them took place last weekend, the Global Game Jam® (GGJ).  Teams all over the globe participated in the game creation spectacle including a UA Little Rock team that COSMOS’ Richard Young was part of. During a 48-hour development cycle, his team collaborated at the Contemporary Rhetorics and User Experience (CRUX) Research and Development Lab to create prototype game designs. Participating teams worldwide shared the common theme of “What home means to you”Read More →

Ph.D. candidate Adewale Obadimu has been selected to participate in the 2019 CRA URMD Grad Cohort Workshop taking place in Waikoloa, Hawaii, in March 2019.  The two-day event is 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. The workshop offers participants the chance to interact and learn from senior computing researchers and professionals, who will provide them with valuable insight about their field, graduate school and their personal experiences.  It is a unique opportunity to develop mentoring relationships and foster peer networks. The workshop has been designed specificallyRead More →

A paper presented by COSMOS director Dr. Nitin Agarwal, and co-authored by Muhammad Nihal Hussain, Kiran Kumar Bandeli, Serpil Tokdemir, and Samer Al-khateeb, has been selected for the best paper award during the eighth international conference on Social Media Technologies, Communication, and Informatics (SOTICS 2018), held in Nice, France, in October 2018. Titled “Understanding Digital Ethnography: Socio-computational Analysis of Trending YouTube Videos,” the paper’s authors have been recognized with the best paper award four years in a row. The paper describes the team’s research on behavioral analysis of YouTube’s digital societies.  The researchers studied the top 200 YouTube videos trending daily for a 40-day period separately in the United States of America (USA) andRead More →

This week, Cosmographer Karen Watts successfully defended her Capstone II project.  She developed the Employee Website for Internal Operational Information for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture Cooperative Extension Service. When Karen started working on the new website, the existing UAEX.edu site was not user-friendly for all audiences. Extension employees, one of UAEX’s largest audiences, found the site confusing and had a hard time finding content because it had been designed with external clientele in mind. “Separating employee content into its own website was necessary to streamline employee user experience so they could find internal resources more quickly and efficiently,” said Karen Watts, an Information ScienceRead More →