COSMOS Research Center is proud to highlight its recent presentation of three milestone studies at the Cyber Social Threats (CySoc), held at the 20th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2026) in Los Angeles, USA.
Organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), ICWSM is recognized internationally as a flagship venue for computational social science, bridging advanced data science with human behavior analysis. Its specialized CySoc workshop provides an essential platform for addressing the dark side of digital platforms, focusing on cyber social threats, coordinated online manipulation, and digital behavior during acute political crises. Participating in this highly competitive venue highlights COSMOS’s ongoing commitment to advancing data-driven tools that safeguard public discourse and foster digital resilience.
Publishing at AAAI ICWSM CySoc directly advances COSMOS’s mission to analyze online influence, cognitive security, and information stability, supported in part by major federal grants dedicated to understanding dynamics across strategic regions, including the Indo-Pacific. Through these projects, COSMOS researchers examine real-world social movements, cross-platform behaviors, and digital discourse across key international contexts, including Nepal, Taiwan, and broader global trade ecosystems.
The three studies presented at CySoc showcase COSMOS’s multi-pronged approach to modeling and mitigating digital threats. The first study extends classical epidemiological frameworks by introducing an immediate relapse mechanism into the SEIRS model, successfully capturing how toxic behavior repeatedly flares up in online communities. The second paper analyzes multilingual discourse from the 2025 youth-led protests in Nepal across five temporal crisis phases, revealing a critical finding for platform moderation: while switching languages within reply chains often reduces general personal insults, it selectively elevates physical threat language, uncovering a covert threat vector that standard filters overlook. The third study applies Weighted Focal Structure Analysis (WFSA) to YouTube recommendation graphs during major events like the 2024 Taiwan presidential election and global tariff debates, demonstrating how algorithmic ranking and navigation depth concentrate structural power within specific content pathways.
Together, these studies highlight COSMOS’s international leadership in socio-cognitive security and ethical AI. By combining advanced mathematical modeling, natural language processing, and network science, COSMOS continues to deliver scalable, real-world insights to counter emerging cyber social threats across the globe.