Cosmographers make a Big Splash at ASONAM 2024!
The 16th Annual International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) leads data mining interdisciplinary research. As the name implies, the conference focuses on Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM), which has gained importance in various fields such as academia, business, politics, and homeland security and has its roots in social and business communities. This research—driven largely by the analysis of online platforms, email records, phone logs, and instant messaging systems—commonly uses graph theory and machine learning. It mirrors the broader trend of society evolving into networks where individuals rely more heavily on their connections.
Dr. Agarwal Speaks on AI and Misinformation on Little Rock Public Radio
On September 12th, NPR aired a special program on digital misinformation and AI, as part of a series of panels on issues hosted by local Little Rock reporter Daniel Breen. In the panel interview, titled Issues That Matter: Digital Dilemmas: Navigating Truth in a Digital World, Dr. Nitin Agarwal spoke as one of the experts on the subject. The broadcast investigated the key questions behind mis- and disinformation awareness.
Research Spotlight: Collective Action in Brazil Electoral Protests
In this month’s research spotlight, COSMOS highlights recent research that focuses on collective mobilization, in the form of political protests. Specifically, the studies titled, “A Computational Approach to Analyze Identity Formation: A Case Study of Brazil Insurrection” and “Role of Co-occurring Words in Mobilization in Brazilian Social Movements,” both studied two protest movements surrounding the 2022 Brazilian elections, one anti- and the other pro-government. These studies were published and presented recently at this year’s annual Americas Conference on Information Sciences (AMCIS 2024) in late August, which took place from 15 to 17 August in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Dr. Agarwal edits a Book on Socio-behavioral Modeling and Simulation published by Springer
Dr. Nitin Agarwal along with colleagues Prof. Leonidas Sakalauskas (Vilnius University, Lithuania), and Prof. Ualsher Tukeyev (Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Kazakhstan) edited a volume on Modeling and Simulation of Social-Behavioral Phenomena in Creative Societies, comprising papers from the proceedings of the 3rd international conference MSBC 2024, which was held in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in September 2024. The volume consists of 16 full papers from the conference’s 42 submissions.
Cosmographer Corner: Dr. Zachary Stine, Professor of Computer Science
Dr. Stine—who is now an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA)—started his graduate education at UA Little Rock in 2012, studying computer science as a post-baccalaureate. Dr. Stine started his PhD under Dr. Agarwal’s supervision and joined COSMOS as a graduate research assistant in 2016. He received his PhD in computer & information sciences in 2021, and worked as a postdoc at COSMOS. We interviewed Dr. Stine on where his career is now and what his work at COSMOS entailed, with his responses in the full article.
Dr. Agarwal co-chairs the 17th annual SBP-BRiMS 2024 Conference
From September 18 to 20, 2024, the 17th annual International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS) was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, co-chaired by Dr. Agarwal. With the help of generous travel funding from the US Army Research Office, several researchers from around the world were able to attend the conference to present their research and learn from colleagues.