Newsletter
U.S. Senator Boozman Announces Support for COSMOS during his Visit to UALR
U.S. Senator John Boozman expressed strong support for UA Little Rock’s COSMOS Research Center and its work in online behavioral research, data analytics, and national security. Highlighting the growing threat of disinformation and foreign extremist activity online, Senator Boozman emphasized the importance of COSMOS’s research in strengthening the nation’s ability to understand and counter emerging cognitive threats.
Hot Off the Press: Narrative Diffusion in Social Networks
In today’s digital landscape, stories spread not just as simple facts but as multi-layered narratives that evolve across social media and have a strong influence on our beliefs and behaviors. COSMOS recently published a comprehensive survey synthesizing almost eight decades of interdisciplinary scholarship in Springer’s Journal of Social Network Analysis and Mining. The survey explores the complex world of computational narratology, detailing how emotionally charged stories evolve, twist, and mutate through online networks and how this differs from traditional information-sharing models. By exploring the challenges of tracking complex storylines, such as semantic drift (how stories constantly change meaning) and the integration of multimodal formats (blend of videos, memes, and text), the research provides a foundational framework for analyzing digital narratives.
Research Spotlight: Competing Narratives Across Network Structures
At the 14th International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications (Complex Networks), New York, USA, COSMOS presented 16 studies. This feature highlights two of those studies that explored how digital narratives evolve and compete online. The first study, focusing on TikTok and the 2024 Taiwan presidential election, introduces a novel stance-aware narrative contagion tracking model that maps narrative competition by categorizing users into promoters, opposers, and skeptics. The second study demonstrates that incorporating the structural shape of a social network alongside the behavior of Generative AI models (like GPT-4o and Gemini 2.5 Pro) provides crucial insights into how geopolitical stories evolve and change meaning as they are shared. Together, these studies emphasize that a platform’s structure, the generative tools used to share information, and the active ideological resistance of users all play critical roles in driving the digital narrative flow.
New Hire: Arunachalam Barathidasan hired as Data Engineer at COSMOS Research Center
COSMOS welcomes Arunachalam Barathidasan as its new full-time Data Engineer, where he supports research engineering efforts at the intersection of data engineering, AI, and large-scale analytics. A recent Master’s graduate in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Arunachalam will apply his experience in AI systems, scalable application development, and entrepreneurship to advance COSMOS research initiatives. He joined COSMOS to apply data-driven technologies to address complex societal challenges and create meaningful impact through research.