COSMOS, in this inaugural edition of Cosmographer Corner, highlights the work of past UALR graduate and Cosmographer Serpil Tokdemir. Tokdemir—who is now the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Arkansas Department of Veteran Affairs—started her doctoral career as a COSMOS researcher during its inception. She received her Ph.D. in Computer and Information Sciences in 2015, and went on to be a postdoctoral fellow at COSMOS. We interviewed Dr. Tokdemir on where her career is now and what her work at COSMOS entailed, with her responses below.
How long were you at COSMOS? How did you come across COSMOS originally, and what drew you to the team?
I worked for 18 months at COSMOS. It was a kind of family to me.
I joined UALR as a Ph.D. student, and my advisors and mentors were Dr. Agarwal and Dr. Wigand. When I graduated, Dr. Agarwal was in the process of building the COSMOS team, and I felt like work at COSMOS would be the perfect opportunity for me to expand my studies and to help other students. I wanted to help mentor other students, giving insight into the kinds of challenges I ran into, so that they will not have to struggle with them in the same way.
Dr. Agarwal and Dr. Wigand had been studying female Muslim bloggers who were protesting the driving ban on women in Saudi Arabia. That topic was another primary draw, because of my own perspective as a female Muslim woman. So I wanted to be a part of that.
I was lucky to have a chance to work on this NSF grant-funded project (with Dr. Agarwal as the PI), where we focused on protests on social media by female Muslim drivers. During my thesis research, I crawled data from blogs and Twitter on this movement.
For your work on women’s driver’s rights, what did that entail? What did you get out of it?
Definitely, it began with looking at what the laws were, actually, and the movement first started with some activists; they created a Facebook page, and there were some blogs that they were posting on. So, at first that was the very early stage of data collection. But many of the social media platforms actually were not allowed in that region. So we focused on Twitter at that time, even if it wasn’t everything, of course, but as a way to see the impact of a single tweet, or lead tweets, and how they were affecting the sampling.
More technically, it meant I filtered blog data and used sentiment analysis on it. I identified whether the triggers of sentiments of individual bloggers converged to a collective sentiment and eventually to an online collective action. This benefited from various collective action theoretical models, and it shed new insight into information diffusion, mutual influence, role distribution, and analysis of activists. We gained a deeper understanding of interconnected social movements and social movement spillover.
What’s interesting and meaningful about having this kind of study is you invest in multi-disciplinary learning, where you see training in all kinds of aspects such as sociology, emotions, mathematical works, analytical work. This research helped me a lot in expanding my areas, because—you think of the programming, the other techniques implied in other fields, taking these human-based fields and skills together—you benefit from bringing these things together, which you don’t necessarily feel when just studying.
Outside your research, what else were you able to accomplish while at COSMOS?
That first year that I started, I was invited to the SOTICS conference, a conference in Athens, Greece. I gave a panel there where I talked about the technical side of my work. I also helped with a variety of projects and lectures, during which I taught students social media mining meaning and network analysis—such as using Gephi. I assisted in preparing publications and presented COSMOS’ work efforts at conferences, program reviews, and other venues. My responsibilities also included supervising, mentoring, evaluating, and monitoring graduate and undergraduate students in their studies/research.
How did such research at COSMOS help with your future/current career?
After I left COSMOS, I was promoted to be the Program Manager at the Office of Medicaid Inspector General (OMIG) and was part of an interdisciplinary team. COSMOS gave me the experience for data collection, cleaning, and preprocessing that I used at OMIG, which I in turn used for transforming the raw medical billing data into an understandable structure, such as an Anomaly Detection and Predictive Analysis and Decision Support System to point out the bad providers/actors. The hypothesis generation and testing I learned at COSMOS allowed me to apply data to many, many facets of OMIG policies—such as using research findings to determine program goals, objectives, and guidelines; developing and implementing policies and procedures; evaluating program effectiveness and compliance; initiating corrective actions and revisions; and providing technical direction and administrative support to program personnel.
With my current work, I continue to grow my career in the Division of Health Services (DHS) as a State System Administrator, and now as the Chief Information Officer for the Arkansas Department of Veteran Affairs. I work with state agencies and departments, and they need not just analytics but also data, especially when it comes to policies. We see our lives within the data—these policies affect many Arkansans—which means coordinating, developing, and approving change orders for projects affecting all AR Medicaid programs. Again, having the interdisciplinary background helps me at making technical and operational recommendations for policy decisions affecting all the AR Medicaid programs. Without COSMOS, I wouldn’t have all the quantitative and qualitative skills that are so important at my current role.
What would be your advice for people at COSMOS and UALR now?
I think first of all, they should know that any role at COSMOS is a very important one. Just being a part of the team, you learn everything: you learn research, you learn about working as a team. Believe in yourself and also challenge yourself, and think about what you can do with this knowledge and experience.