COSMOS director and Arkansas Research Alliance fellow Dr. Nitin Agarwal spoke about deviant online behavior at UA Little Rock Downtown on Wednesday, March 13.  This behavior includes, but is not limited to, deviant mobs of the Internet, disinformation campaigns, bots, trolls and computational propaganda techniques. Dr. Agarwal presented examples of how the spread of misinformation online affects the real world from fueling hatred that leads to violence to spreading incorrect medical information that will result in health risks. The spread of “fake news” can also influence voters, create confusion during disasters and cause hysteria of the masses.   Deviant online behavior spreads over many platforms.Read More →

  This week cosmographer Zachary Stine presented his paper “Agent-based models for assessing social influence strategies” at the 9th International Conference on Complex Systems hosted by the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, MA. It is a unique interdisciplinary forum that unifies and bridges the traditional domains of science and a multitude of real-world systems. The conference was held from July 22 – 27 in Cambridge, MA. The paper has been published in the conference’s proceedings available here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-96661-8_14 Stine, the lead author of the paper, is a Ph.D. student in Computer & Information science at UA Little Rock. Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor ofRead More →