We are delighted to announce that seven research studies from COSMOS have been accepted for presentation and published at the 18th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction, and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS 2025), to be held October 15–17, 2025, at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Now in its eighteenth year, SBP-BRiMS serves as a premier international forum uniting researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from diverse disciplines, including computer science, behavioral science, and social systems research. The conference focuses on advancing data-driven and simulation-based approaches to understanding human behavior, decision-making, and societal dynamics, bridging the gap between computational methods and real-world applications in national security, public health, social media, and organizational resilience.
Prof. Nitin Agarwal, Founding Director of COSMOS, co-founded the SBP conference in 2008 along with Prof. Huan Liu of Arizona State University. At that time, there was a distinct lack of interdisciplinary venues for exploring the intersection of social computing and behavioral modeling. Their pioneering vision established SBP as a cornerstone for collaborative, cross-disciplinary research in computational social science—one that continues to thrive nearly two decades later. Later, the BRiMS conference was merged with SBP in 2015 to call it the SBP-BRiMS conference. Prof. Agarwal’s enduring contributions have been instrumental in shaping the conference’s mission to foster innovation, scientific rigor, and societal impact.
To support the mission of the conference of exposing early career researchers to the social computing discipline, seven cosmographers (along with several researchers across the world) received travel awards of up to $1,000 each from Prof. Agarwal to attend and present their research at the conference.
The following seven studies from COSMOS were presented at the SBP-BRiMS 2025 International Conference at CMU, Pittsburgh, USA.
- Analyzing Democratic Trust Through Symbolic Communication: A Case Study of Taiwan’s Presidential Election
- Structure, Semantics, and Attraction: Analyzing Homophily in Recommender Networks
- Examining Generational Influence in Online Toxicity: Context-Dependent Patterns in Health and Political Discourse
- Studying Emotional and Trust-Building Effects of Symbolic Communication on YouTube
- Uncovering Structural Consistency in YouTube Channels
- Evaluating Synthetic Data Generation Methods for Anomalous Channel Detection in Sparse-Label Environments
- Competing Narratives during Conflicts: Modeling Narrative Diffusion on Telegram in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Collectively, these works highlight COSMOS’s continued leadership in advancing the field of computational social science, offering novel insights into trust, influence, information diffusion, and the dynamics of digital ecosystems.
The success of COSMOS at SBP-BRiMS 2025 reflects not only the strength of our research but also the passion and purpose that drive our community. Each study presented embodies our core mission, leveraging data science for social good. With every discovery, COSMOS continues to illuminate how computational insights can help societies understand, adapt, and thrive in an ever-evolving digital world.