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 →

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 →