Dr. Nitin Agarwal, founding director of the Collaboration for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS) Research Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has received $5 million from the Army Research Office to evaluate and defend against emerging cognitive threats. The Army Research Office is a directorate of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory. The two year project aims to identify research gaps in deviant socio-technical behaviors, shape an agenda focused on developing strategies that can counter emerging threats, and create tools for near real-time analysis of such threats. “Narratives on social media could be easily weaponized andRead 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 →

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 →

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 →

Tuja Khaund will be speaking at today’s UALR’s EIT Colloquium. Her talk “Information Actors on Social Media: Who are they and how do they coordinate?” will start at 3:00 PM CST today, Friday, April 10. To view her presentation live online, visit: https://us.bbcollab.com/guest/1c555535701140c8a156f8451c9baa20 Abstract of Talk: Online social networks (OSNs) are a major component of societal digitalization. OSNs alter how people communicate, make decisions, form or change their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Thus, they can now impact financial systems and political communication at scale. As one type of OSN, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. serve as outlets for users to convey information toRead More →