Karen DiCicco successfully defended her master’s thesis “Blockchain Applications in Agriculture” Tuesday, November 19, 2019.  In attendance were committee members Dr. Nitin Agarwal (chair), Dr. Elizabeth Pierce, and Dr. Ningning Wu as well as members of COSMOS.  In December 2018, Karen graduated with her bachelor’s degree and Graduate Certificate in Data Science.  She will continue her research on blockchain applications as a University of Arkansas at Little Rock Information Science PhD student this Spring.    For more information about the Information Science programs offered, please visit https://ualr.edu/informationscience/. Read More →

It was a sunny Friday afternoon.  Students rushed out of Alice Drive Middle School in Sumter, SC, ready to start their weekend.  15 students stayed behind. Laughter filled the classroom as they were getting ready for their club meeting. Their club is officially called the Science Fiction and Fantasy Federation, short SF3.  Their weekly two-hour club meetings are providing them with a creative outlet for their diverse interests in the areas of science fiction, fantasy, and fandom genres. This may all sound like fun and games, which is certainly part of the club activities, but club members don’t simply chat for two hours about theRead More →

This week, Cosmographer Karen Watts successfully defended her Capstone II project.  She developed the Employee Website for Internal Operational Information for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture Cooperative Extension Service. When Karen started working on the new website, the existing UAEX.edu site was not user-friendly for all audiences. Extension employees, one of UAEX’s largest audiences, found the site confusing and had a hard time finding content because it had been designed with external clientele in mind. “Separating employee content into its own website was necessary to streamline employee user experience so they could find internal resources more quickly and efficiently,” said Karen Watts, an Information ScienceRead More →

COSMOS team members Karen Watts and Michael DiCicco have made winning hackathons a hobby of sorts. On September 29th, 2018, Karen and Michael along with Brenda Nyangweso formed a team named sudoIntellectual that went up against 21other teams at the UA Blockchain Hackathon and emerged as winners of the J.B. Hunt Use Case challenge. Blockchain technology is the biggest buzzword in the recent times. It rose to prominence in 2009 as the technology that underpins bitcoin. Blockchain is a public ledger for every transaction that might take place between two or more parties. Today, there is a growing interest in making use of this distributed,Read More →

Moving from a humanities discipline as an undergraduate into a STEM field for graduate school was not exactly easy. I am hesitant to recommend this academic trajectory generally, but have found that my undergraduate training in the humanities has been a great source of help, even in a field that seems completely unrelated. When I first started college, I had no idea what subject I wanted to major in. I had just decided to switch from an out-of-state school, where I had been accepted into their music composition program, to a smaller in-state school after deciding against music composition. In my first semester, I tookRead More →

Briefly, introducing myself here. I am Kiran Kumar Bandeli, a doctoral candidate in Information Science and work with COSMOS as a Graduate Research Assistant. I am part of several research and development projects. I am in a phase where I am working on my dissertation proposal. I am hopeful that I can graduate at the end of spring or summer 2019.   So, what do I do in the COSMOS lab? I can definitely say, I wear several hats as part of my work schedule. One such role is Teaching Assistant (TA) for Dr. Agarwal’s courses, where I switch gears from being a student toRead 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 →

In February, more than 409 million people read the over 20.8 billion pages posted on WordPress.com, a popular blogging platform. Blogging remains a popular form of online communication that is growing at an exponential rate, yet few researchers have grasped the potential of data mining the blogosphere for research purposes.  The University of Arkansas at Little Rock is among the very few universities in the country with a team and projects dedicated to researching blogs. One of the researchers heading this project is Muhammad Nihal Hussain, a fifth-year doctoral student in information science and a core researcher at COSMOS (Collaboratorium for Social Media and BehavioralRead More →