COSMOS researchers earned the “Best Paper Award” for their submission “YouTube Video Categorization Using Moviebarcode” at the International Academy, Research, and Industry Association (IARIA) Conference on Human and Social Analytics (HUSO 2020), held in Porto, Portugal.  The paper written by Recep Erol, Rick Rejeleene, Richard Young, Thomas Marcoux, Dr. Muhammad Nihal Hussain, and Dr. Nitin Agarwal introduces the idea of utilizing moviebarcode, a technique used to summarize videos by compressing an entire video into a single image, to systematically categorize YouTube videos. “Moviebarcodes are typically used to visualize summary of videos,” stated lead author Recep Erol. “However, we used the color theory computationally so thatRead More →

We are pleased to announce that the paper “A Framework towards Computational Narrative Analysis on Blogs” written by Kiran Kumar Bandeli, Muhammad Nihal Hussain, and Nitin Agarwal has been published in The 3rd International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story’20) co-located with 42nd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2020). The paper introduces the idea of extracting narratives automatically on blogs to provide a better situational awareness. Narratives can be represented as semantic triplets of actors and their actions towards other actors. This is important because it provides sociologists/political scientists to gain situational awareness by tracking different opinions, political views, and narratives as theyRead More →

Muhammad Nihal Hussain successfully defended his doctoral dissertation “Role of Multiple Social Media Platforms in Online Campaigns.”  His committee consisted of Dr. Nitin Agarwal (chair), Dr. Samer Al-khateeb, Dr. Elizabeth Pierce, Dr. John Talburt, and Dr. Ningning Wu.  Hussain studied cross-media information dissemination, in which content posted on one platform is shared to another to boost visibility. During his time at COSMOS, he has analyzed information operations campaigns conducted against NATO exercises. Throughout these campaigns, information actors utilized several platforms to disseminate content.  “Most researchers focus on one platform to study disinformation, but dissemination strategies have evolved,” Hussain said. “Multiple social media platforms are usedRead More →

On Thursday, April 18, students showcased their work at the Student Research and Creative Works Expo and EIT Open House. Guests viewed displays of capstone projects, theses, dissertations, and other research. COSMOS was well-presented by Kiran Kumar Bandeli, Nihal Hussain, Thomas Marcoux, Billy Spann, Richard Young, Michael DiCicco, Tuja Khaund, Karen Watts, Zachary Stine, and Adewale Obadimu who showcased their work. Our team members were presented with numerous awards at the 2019 Student Research and Creative Works Expo Awards Ceremony and the EIT Open House Awards Ceremony: Student Research and Creative Works Expo – First Place: Zachary Stine Student Research and Creative Works Expo – SecondRead More →

A paper presented by COSMOS director Dr. Nitin Agarwal, and co-authored by Muhammad Nihal Hussain, Kiran Kumar Bandeli, Serpil Tokdemir, and Samer Al-khateeb, has been selected for the best paper award during the eighth international conference on Social Media Technologies, Communication, and Informatics (SOTICS 2018), held in Nice, France, in October 2018. Titled “Understanding Digital Ethnography: Socio-computational Analysis of Trending YouTube Videos,” the paper’s authors have been recognized with the best paper award four years in a row. The paper describes the team’s research on behavioral analysis of YouTube’s digital societies.  The researchers studied the top 200 YouTube videos trending daily for a 40-day period separately in the United States of America (USA) andRead More →

The 11th International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS 2018) took place in Washington DC this past week.   The four-day multidisciplinary conference with a selective single paper track and poster session attracted participants from across the globe. A full list of the papers, posters, demos, and other publications is available from the conference website. Conference co-chairs Dr. Kathleen M. Carley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Dr. Nitin Agarwal, director of Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS) at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, welcomed students, research scientists, and members from funding agencies. COSMOSRead 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 →

A group of researchers from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock are studying how the mass migration of refugees from Middle Eastern and North African countries into Europe has created a shift in the migrant narrative in online communication.  The paper, “Analyzing Shift in Narratives Regarding Migrants in Europe via Blogosphere,” has been accepted in the Text2Story18 workshop at the 40th annual European Conference on Information Retrieval, a premier conference in information retrieval, to be held March 26-29 in Grenoble, France. The lead author of the paper, Muhammad Nihal Hussain, a fifth-year doctoral student in information science and a researcher at COSMOS (Collaboratorium forRead More →

A group of University of Arkansas at Little Rock students has won the Best Paper Award from the International Academy, Research, and Industry Association (IARIA) for their paper studying blogs’ effect on the information flow of Venezuelan migration. Esther Mead, a doctoral student from Sheridan researching information science and information quality, was the lead author for the paper, “Assessing Situation Awareness through Blogosphere: A Case Study on Venezuelan Socio-Political Crisis and the Migrant Influx.” The paper explored how blogs disseminate information regarding social and political views and concerns of citizens within a community. As a case study, the researchers examined nearly 30,000 blog posts fromRead More →