Several students from the COSMOS Research Center have won awards for their research at the 2024 University of Arkansas at Little Rock Research and Creative Works Expo that was held on Friday, April 19th, 2024. The campus-wide Research and Creative Works Expo celebrates the research of students from all colleges, with awards given specifically by the DCSTEM college to DCSTEM students. At the Spring 2024 DCSTEM college end-of-year awards ceremony, held Friday, May 3rd, the college gave out several awards for the Dean’s Mainstream Expo division and for the Dean’s Elevator Speech. Among the award winners were the following Cosmographers:

• Niloofar Yousefi, with the 1st place award for the Dean’s Mainstream Expo for the project titled Examining Multimodal Emotion Assessment and Resonance with Audience on YouTube
• Ishmam Solaiman, with the 3rd place award for the Dean’s Mainstream Expo for the project titled Introducing our YouTube Bot – a Fully-Automated Content Discovery and Collection Agent
• Mayor Inna Gurung, with the Award of Distinction for the Dean’s Elevator Speech Award for the presentation of the project titled Decoding YouTube’s Recommendation System: A Comparative Study of Metadata and GPT-4 Extracted Narratives

“It was an honor to receive these awards. Winning this prize not only recognizes my hard work and dedication but also motivates me to further enhance my skills. I am committed to building my presentation abilities, aiming to effectively share my work with broader audiences in the future,” said Mayor Inna. “It was truly a remarkable experience—my first time delivering an elevator pitch with a strict one-minute limit. I had to carefully balance providing sufficient detail while also being concise, ensuring that every word contributed meaningfully to my message. I am glad our research is getting local recognition.”

Niloofar said, “I’m deeply honored to receive the Dean’s mainstream awards. It’s a demonstration to the dedication and passion that I pour into my work every day with the guidance of my advisor, Dr. Agarwal. This award reflects the hours of hard work, teamwork and research. I’m grateful for the opportunity to make a meaningful impact. This award motivates us to keep pushing boundaries and aiming for greatness.” 

Ishmam said, “My research expo presentation was on the YouTube content discovery bot we’ve been building at COSMOS. This bot is a data collection tool for YouTube.” He explains, “This project is based on the idea of making the tedious process of collecting data from YouTube much simpler and faster. The expo was a great experience and opportunity to showcase the capabilities and possibilities with the project. I talked about it with various judges and interested individuals and got to hear how the project seemed to them and to discover the many interesting ideas and point of views of different people.”

Dr. Agarwal said, “Each of the projects presented at the UA Little Rock Research Expo demonstrates our unwavering commitment to ground-breaking research. The recognitions are testament to the incredible hard work and diligence demonstrated by each and every cosmographer.”