On Monday, September 23, participants of the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program made a stop at UA Little Rock. Individuals from seven different countries spent the morning speaking with members of the COSMOS team to learn about the broad range of research taking place, particularly regarding social cyber security and misinformation on social media. The countries represented include Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Montenegro, Romania, and Tajikistan. Delegates learned about tools COSMOS Cosmographers have developed in order to study disinformation on social media platforms. Blogtrackers is a tool designed by Dr. Nitin Agarwal in 2009 to to track and analyze blogs and gainRead More →

During a news conference at the state capitol with Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, Arkansas Research Alliance (ARA) inducted Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Science and director of the Collaboratorium of Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS), as an ARA Fellow for his contributions to research in Arkansas. “We are honored to have these immensely talented researchers join the ARA Academy of Scholars and Fellows,” said Jerry Adams, ARA president and chief executive officer. Since its launch in 2014, the ARA Academy of Scholars and Fellows program recognizes leaders in research who are currently working at one of the five state’s research universitiesRead More →

Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Science and director of the Collaboratorium of Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS), was inducted as a fellow of the Arkansas Academy of Computing for his contributions to computing in Arkansas on Nov. 2 in Fayetteville. “It is an honor to be recognized as a fellow of the Arkansas Academy of Computing,” Agarwal said. “I am looking forward to collaborating with the great thinkers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and computational scientists to advance the discipline of computing and contribute towards innovation in the state of Arkansas.” Founded in 2006, the Arkansas Academy of ComputingRead More →

As almost 400 attendees gathered at the 2018 NATO Information Communicators’ Conference (NICC) in Rome this September, Ph.D. fellow Katrin Galeano represented COSMOS to showcase the emerging technologies Blogtrackers and YouTubeTracker. The annual conference invited communication professionals from within NATO as well as academia and industry to discuss tools and strategies for Information Environment Assessment (IEA), the theme of this year’s conference.   Mrs. Galeano was invited to the NICC to demonstrate technologies developed by COSMOS during the workshop sessions held on Thursday, September September 20.  As one of only 51 presenters from NATO, industry and academia from all NATO member states, she presented COSMOS’Read More →

My name is Michael DiCicco. I’m a junior here at UA Little Rock majoring in Information Science, a Technical Assistant at the UA Division of Agriculture Cooperative Extension Service, and a Research Assistant at COSMOS.  What little spare time I have is spent traveling around the country participating in 24-hour long competitions called “hackathons”. Not that kind of hack, think lifehack + marathon. The hackathons I participate in are generally sponsored by the company Major League Hacking, and their current schedules are posted on their website https://mlh.io.  MLH hackathons are really great because they accommodate participants of all skill levels. They are catered offering deliciousRead More →

Please allow me to introduce myself to you; I am Rita Chowdhury a full-time, second-year MBA student at the UA Little Rock College of Business and a Graduate Research Assistant at COSMOS – a research team in the Department of Information Science. Apart from that I am currently a student member of the Joe T. Ford Investment Fund at the College of Business. Many a time the introduction makes way for numerous questions. Much like why am I in an Information Science research team? What might I be doing? How did I make it to the team? Do I have an engineering undergraduate degree? IfRead 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 →

Researchers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock are studying how social bots influence the delivery of news via social media during major disasters.  The study examines the role of social bots – automated Twitter accounts that attempt to affect or influence the behaviors of others – and their coordination and communication patterns with complex organizational structures to disseminate information during four natural disasters that occurred in 2017. The paper, “Analyzing Social Bots and their Coordination during Natural Disasters,” will be discussed at the SBP BRiMS 2018 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation to be heldRead More →