COSMOS began studying election-related social media content in 2019. To examine the possible use of a hostile online media campaign orchestrated to influence the 2019 Canadian Federal election, researchers used an in-house application called YouTubeTracker to collect more than 6,000 videos and more than one million comments. They combined multiple social media analysis techniques, social cyber forensic methods, content analysis, and mathematical-sociological constructs to determine whether online influence campaigns were orchestrated on YouTube.  “We have been extending our focus from blogs and Twitter to YouTube because the popular and interactive video sharing platform with more than one billion users has become a tool to spreadRead More →

Joseph Kready and Thomas Marcoux won $10,000 by placing third in the Walton Family Foundation Graduate Division of the 20th annual Arkansas Governor’s Cup Collegiate Business Plan Competition. The duo competed as team Face-To-Face introducing an innovative technology that creates Avatar-based chatbots that replace existing text-based chatbot solutions. Face-to-Face is the first University of Arkansas at Little Rock team to place in the Graduate Division since 2009. This year, the competition was conducted with the help of videoconferencing technologies. 18 teams from eight Arkansas universities virtually presented their innovative ideas and business plan which were judged by volunteers from Arkansas’s private and public sector business,Read More →

Congratulations to Joseph Kready for being accepted to the 2020 Social Networks and Health Fellowship program at Duke University from May 11-15, 2020. The program is hosted by Duke Network Analysis Center (DNAC) and the Duke Population Research Institute, with support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Joseph will be participating in the week-long training course, covering a wide range of social network analysis topics related to studying health behaviors, including data collection, influence, network visualization, and agent-based modeling. He will be matched with a mentor, who will advise Joseph for a year to work on his ongoingRead More →