November 2024
Prof. Nitin Agarwal Speaks at Arkansas Research Alliance Project Scope on AI and Misinformation
COSMOS director Prof. Nitin Agarwal was recently hosted by the Arkansas Research Alliance’s (ARA) Project Scope on October 2nd to speak about how the COSMOS team combats digital misinformation and influence campaigns using AI-powered approaches. Prof. Agarwal discussed how our research focuses on analyzing multimedia content across social platforms to identify coordinated inauthentic behavior, including elections and crises.
Cosmographers win Best Paper Award at SOTICS 2024
One of our studies won the Best Paper Award at the Fourteenth International Conference on Social Media Technologies, Communication, and Informatics (SOTICS 2024)! The study entitled “Examining the Impact of Toxicity on Community Structure in Social Networks” focused on how toxic content affects social media communities, specifically in the context of COVID-19 scams, misinformation, and conspiracy theories, and was authored by Niloofar Yousefi, Prof. Nitin Agarwal, Dr. Karen Watts DiCicco, and Md. Samin Morshed.
Cosmographers make a Splash at SBP-BRiMS 2024
From September 18 to 20, 2024, the 17th SBP-BRiMS conference was held at Pittsburgh, PA. This year COSMOS had 6 papers accepted and presented at the conference. Several cosmographers traveled to the conference with Prof. Agarwal to present their research with travel support from Prof. Agarwal.
Research Spotlight: Information Diffusion as Contagion
In this month’s research spotlight, we highlight recent research from COSMOS that focuses on using epidemiological modeling to study information diffusion. Each studied information diffusion, such as online toxicity spread, from the point of view of contagion using epidemiological models. These studies were published and presented recently at this year’s annual International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2024) in early September, which took place from 2 to 5 September in Calabria, Italy.
Cosmographer Corner: Dr. Zachary Stine, Professor of Computer Science
Dr. Hussain—who is now a lead data scientist for Equifax—started his graduate education at UA Little Rock in 2014, studying for a master’s in information quality. In his second year, Dr. Hussain decided to pursue a PhD in computer & information sciences. He received his PhD in computer & information sciences in 2019, and worked as a postdoc at COSMOS afterwards. We interviewed Dr. Hussain on where his career is now and what his work at COSMOS entailed, with his responses in the full article.