Newsletter
Prof. Nitin Agarwal Recognized with the 2026 DCSTEM College Faculty Research Excellence Award
Prof. Nitin Agarwal, Maulden-Entergy Chair, Donaghey Distinguished Professor, and Founding Director of the COSMOS Research Center at UA Little Rock, has been recognized with the 2026 DCSTEM College Faculty Excellence Award for Research and Creative Endeavors. This honor celebrates his outstanding research leadership and impactful contributions to social computing, cognitive security, online influence analysis, and socio-cognitive behavior research.
COSMOS Makes a Splash at 30th PACIS 2026 Conference
COSMOS Research Center is pleased to announce that three papers have been accepted for publication at the 30th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS 2026) in Jakarta, Indonesia. PACIS is one of the leading international conferences in information systems and the only Association for Information Systems conference dedicated to the Pacific Asia region. Supported by research grants focused on the Indo-Pacific region, these papers analyze the massive digital footprints of the 2025 Indonesian protests. Presenting our findings at PACIS underscores our strategic commitment to studying this critical geopolitical area. By applying our latest methodologies, specifically the Multilayer Behavioral Homogenization Framework (MBHF) and Contextual Influence–Focal Structure Analysis (CI-FSA), this work challenges traditional understandings of digital activism, platform recommendation algorithms, and toxic discourse to provide vital insights for global platform governance.
Hot Off the Press: Discovering Cross-Platform Narrative Flow Templates Using Frequent Subgraph Mining
COSMOS recently published a new study in Springer’s Journal of Social Network Analysis and Mining. The study introduces a graph-mining framework for discovering recurring cross-platform narrative flow templates, revealing how narratives propagate across YouTube, TikTok, X, and Instagram. Using the recent Tariff War as a case study, the research identifies distinct diffusion patterns across platforms and provides a scalable computational approach for understanding the evolution and spread of online narratives across digital ecosystems.
Research Spotlight: Analyzing Toxic Structures in Social Networks
At the 14th International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications (Complex Networks 2025) in New York, researchers from the COSMOS Research Center presented three groundbreaking studies that fundamentally challenge how digital platforms moderate toxic content. These studies introduce Weighted Focal Structure Analysis (WFSA), a novel framework designed to detect and neutralize coordinated toxic groups on social media. Findings revealed that opposing groups in political conflicts start to act exactly alike (Behavioral Homogenization), allowing tight-knit toxic clusters to exploit shared beliefs and spread harm much faster than individual influencers. By combining WFSA with Integer Programming, the team successfully targeted these specific clusters, removing toxicity up to 4.2 times more effectively without exceeding a platform’s realistic user ban limits.
New Hire: Sanket Bhangale hired as Data Engineer at COSMOS Research Center
COSMOS welcomes Sanket Bhangale as a new Data Engineer. Originally from India and a recent graduate of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with a Bachelor of Science degree, Sanket brings contagious energy to learning and working on scalable, robust, and resilient data pipelines that power socio-computational research and software tools.