COSMOS, in this edition of Cosmographer Corner, highlights the work of former University of Arkansas at Little Rock graduate and Cosmographer Dr. Kiran Kumar Bandeli. 

Dr. Bandeli—who is now a Senior Data Scientist and Manager at Walmart—started his graduate education at UA Little Rock in 2014, studying for his master’s in information quality. After starting his PhD, he joined COSMOS as research assistant in 2017. He received his PhD in computer & information sciences in 2019. We interviewed Dr. Bandeli on where his career is now and what his work at COSMOS entailed, with his responses below.

How did COSMOS fit into your university/secondary education career? How did you come across COSMOS, and what were you studying when you joined COSMOS?

So when I think of COSMOS, I first think about my journey at UA Little Rock. I’d been a master’s student, but also an international student. I started my journey at UA Little Rock with my master’s in information quality. After I finished my master’s, I worked with a PhD student in information quality, going back in time. We were crawling event-related databases—I was able to crawl all the way to 1970, if my memory serves right, from 1970 up to 2014—so I joined that project in 2014, and that’s when I got a chance and my first glimpse of working with social media data. That work was one of my main motivations to join COSMOS because that’s where I saw and learned things like, “How do you analyze, how do you crawl, all of these data?” And that’s where I came to know from Dr. Agarwal’s courses that we have these social media analytics—back then, called social media analytics—or what we now call social computing. So I was really fascinated by all of that. After my master’s, I became an information quality PhD student, and transitioned into the COSMOS lab.

How would you describe the “research pipeline” that you worked on while at COSMOS? In other words, what was the specific area in which you researched?

Before COSMOS, I focused in system analysis, learning about things like the life cycle in an IT or how do you design a system, but what really drove me was my curiosity on social computing and social media analysis.

Since joining COSMOS, I have worked in misinformation and disinformation research work. My initial articles were directly with Dr. Agarwal, working on blogs, fake news, and dis/misinformation activities. One of the papers that we published was in Digital Hydra and was part of a NATO publication. A second focus was entirely on blogs—all the way from blog data collection, analysis, and then to insights. Finally, my dissertation topic was on narrative analysis—how do you find what narratives are mainstream, or what are the fringe narratives that you can find from a given blog data.

Since leaving COSMOS, what roles/positions/jobs have you had? What is your current work?

Currently, I work at Walmart as a data scientist, which started as an internship for them while I was a COSMOS student. That was in my final year. Then when I finished my graduation and defended my PhD dissertation, I joined Walmart. Ever since, Walmart has been the main part of my career journey. 

What positions did COSMOS and your classes at UALR best prepare you for?

In terms of classes, ones that really helped me were social computing and system analysis by Dr. Agarwal and machine learning by UA Little Rock computer science professors. I also think that, one, courses are helpful, but more importantly, the work you do alongside them is key—which in my case was working at COSMOS. I became more of a problem solver there, because when we worked in the lab, there were still quite a number of problems that we were dealing with—whether it was maintaining the systems, crawling the data, or saving it to the databases.

We were involved in the, I would say, full life cycle of data science, right from defining the problem, going to get your data, doing the preparation, all of that. And, then once it was ready for any of the modeling (such as topic modeling), more text mining or natural language processing (NLP), as well as the process of reporting your insights, all of that.

I think COSMOS has really helped me to tackle any challenge in the data science and information science-related workspaces.

If you had to describe the most momentous event at COSMOS, what would it be?

My first conference presentation was in my second year of PhD, at the International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS). It was about disinformation and misinformation, and how to analyze online campaign coordinations, more specifically fake news. What was memorable was not just the presentation but the amount of collaboration that I’d done with Dr. Agarwal. Later on, Dr. Agarwal and I both got really busy, so I consider myself lucky for it and that we were able to produce a significant number of research papers from that research.

What advice would you have for current Cosmographers?

For anybody who is starting their PhD, my strong advice would be try to submit as many papers as possible to conferences. Conferences are a great way to present your work, and more importantly, you can network with your peers who are in the field and get to know experts who are in different areas in the field. 

So how do you condense all the literature that you’re going through and then how do you publish a paper, right? With support from Dr. Agarwal, I think you can produce a lot of good papers, which is how to make it to a conference. A great paper will always land you into a conference, that will help you network with the right peers and experts in the domain who show up at the conference. Also, quantity is important, but then you will have to tie that back to your dissertation. So you can publish more, but then your dissertation-wise, if you’re not making strides, that’s another thing that you’re going to have to fix. So I would say, narrowing down your research topics and then focusing on key areas will help your dissertation. And I think that should be the path for any Cosmographer.