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 →

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 →

Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge today announced a partnership with the University of Arkansas Little Rock (UALR) and the Arkansas Research Alliance to identify and track scam websites and social media misinformation related to COVID-19 that have rapidly spread with the pandemic.  Misinformation posted on websites and social media has been spreading quickly. False claims, misleading information and the sale of fake cures and treatments undermine Arkansas’ efforts to combat this disease and present a hazard to consumers’ physical, financial and online safety. The collaboration with COSMOS offers a new avenue to quickly identify the bad actors who want to spread misinformation or steal consumers’Read 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 →

Kiran Kumar Bandeli successfully defended his doctoral dissertation “A Framework Toward Computational Narrative Analysis on Blogs/Social Media” Monday, November 25, 2019.  In attendance were committee members Dr. Nitin Agarwal (chair), Dr. Elizabeth Pierce, Dr. John Talburt, and Dr. Ningning Wu as well as members of COSMOS.  During his time at COSMOS, Kiran quickly familiarize himself with blogs.  “Blogs in particular act as virtual spaces where narratives are framed. It is therefore important to study and understand the way information is said by the actors on social media platforms,” Kiran explained. Narratives are organized, long-lasting themes and ideas that persist in discourses. It is challenging toRead More →

Billy Spann successfully defended his master’s thesis “Structural Decomposition of Deviant Cyber Flash Mobs on Twitter Using Focal Structure Analysis” Friday, November 22, 2019.  In attendance were committee members Dr. Nitin Agarwal (chair), Dr. Elizabeth Pierce, and Dr. Dan Berleant as well as members of COSMOS.  Since he joined COSMOS in the summer of 2018, Billy has developed an interest in studying collection action groups. He familiarized himself with the deviant cyber flash mobs (DCFM) model developed by Dr. Samer Al-khateeb and Dr. Agarwal and used it as a stepping stone for his work.  The goal of his research was to use DCFM structural networkRead More →

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 →

United States Senator John Boozman visited UA Little Rock on Friday, November 15, 2019. He met with COSMOS director Dr. Nitin Agarwal and several researchers to gain insights about the work COSMOS is conducting.  COSMOS has been awarded a $2.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop ways to track emerging cyber-social threats and strengthen social cybersecurity research infrastructure. Dr. Agarwal presented his talk “Deviant Mobs of the Internet: Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures” during which he discussed how social media analytics research is used to track malicious activities, including the dissemination of propaganda, hoaxes, and disinformation to influence beliefs and behaviors. “WeRead More →

Richard Young successfully defended his information science master’s project “Chromaweaver: A Moviebarcode Analysis Tool for Youtube” Friday, November 8, 2019.  In attendance were committee members Dr. Nitin Agarwal (chair), Dr. Bruce Bauer and Dr. Joseph Williams as well as members of COSMOS. Richard is a remote student currently living in Spain and did his defense via Google Hangout.  For his project, Richard explored moviebarcode image processing techniques that can be integrated into the COSMOS application YoutubeTracker. The end result is the standalone application Chromaweaver, which serves as a moviebarcode analysis tool for Youtube videos. Richard documented his work for the project as a blog. BeingRead More →

COSMOS director Dr. Nitin Agarwal participated in the two-day workshop “Understanding and Countering Online Falsehoods and Influence Operations” organized by the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS), a research unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.  CENS brought together experts from academia, industry and governments from across the globe to share their insights and experiences.  The goal was to gain a better understanding of the issues from a multidisciplinary perspective, how organizations and countries deal with these issues and how problems can be countered by using existing and new means. As an expert from academia,Read More →