The 1000 Dream Fund: Stella Mbila-Uma Awarded the 2024 Face of Tech Award
The 1,000 Dreams Fund aims to empower students toward their greatest ambitions. It funds scholarships for young women in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) fields. Cosmographer Stella Mbila-Uma was recently awarded their New Face of Tech scholarship this Spring 2024! COSMOS celebrates this accomplishment and is immensely proud to have been part of and helped her receive this honor!
“We are extremely proud of Stella Mbila-Uma for winning the prestigious and competitive ‘New Face of Tech Scholarship’ that encourages women’s participation in STEAM disciplines – an effort we champion and celebrate at COSMOS.
Research Spotlight: CFSA and Knowledge Graphs
Social media platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook are fast-growing microblogging services reporting daily news, social activities, and local and global real-life events. Users can exchange information, links, images, or videos with limited content restrictions. These are converted into important sources for true or false information, fake news, misinformation, and disinformation that can simultaneously benefit or damage society.
In this edition of our research spotlight, we delve into a breakthrough research focus area in COSMOS that solves the issue of analyzing multiple platforms at once: the combination of ‘contextualizing focal structure analysis in social networks (CFSA)’ and ‘utilizing Knowledge Graphs (KG)’. CFSA discovers the influential sets of actors that mobilize campaigns on a given social media platform, while knowledge graphs help fuse different social media platforms.
ICMIP 2024: Upcoming Breakthroughs in Multimedia and Image Processing Research (WIP title)
The International Conference on Multimedia and Image Processing (ICMIP) gathers researchers who, as the name implies, present each year novel methods in processing images and multimedia content. In previous years, this international conference has seen delegates come together from different areas to present the research and new ideas on such processing, establishing business and research relationships and having met in international locations like China, Malaysia, and Brunei Darussalam. From April 20–22, 2024, the 9th ICMIP will be held in Osaka, Japan. Sponsored by Ritsumeikan University, this year’s ICMIP will take place at the Ritsumeikan University Osaka (OIC) campus. Two studies from COSMOS researchers—viz., Niloofar Yousefi, Mert Can Cakmak, Mainuddin Shaik, and Dr. Nitin Agarwal—have been accepted for publication at this prestigious conference!
COSMOS Director Presents Groundbreaking Research in Cybersecurity at InfraGard Partnership Event
COSMOS director Dr. Nitin Agarwal presented research in cybersecurity at the annual InfraGard Partnership for Protection meeting for the Arkansas Chapter, held on January 26th.
InfraGard is a partnership which connects those in the private sector with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for the goal of informing and protecting US critical infrastructure. InfraGard serves as a home for collaboration between owners and operators involved in critical infrastructure with the FBI; this collaboration revolves around providing education, information sharing, networking, and workshopping on emerging technology and threats. InfraGard membership is highly exclusive; currently, the organization is not even accepting applications, although interested individuals can apply to be added to a waitlist. Membership is made up of many different kinds of people and positions, like business executives, entrepreneurs, lawyers, security personnel, military and government officials, IT professionals, state and local law enforcement, and academics and researchers.
COSMOS Research Center Celebrates Women’s Brilliance and Resilience: #IWD 2024
March marks International Women’s Month, and we are always very excited to celebrate the women at COSMOS and those all over the globe. International Women’s Month (IWD), which is celebrated every March 8th, transcends being a mere date on the calendar, through the coming together of women to achieve equality.
It serves as a global movement commemorating the resilient spirit and remarkable accomplishments of women across the globe. This year’s campaign theme is centered around Inspiring Inclusion.
What does it mean to inspire inclusion? Creating a truly inclusive environment means fostering a sense of belonging and empowerment for everyone, regardless of their background or identity. It ensures everyone feels valued, respected, and heard and that they can contribute fully and authentically to the collective while having their voices acknowledged and considered