Don’t miss Friday’s Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology Colloquium. Adewale Obadimu and Thomas Marcoux will be discussing ‘Social Media Analysis for Defeating Disinformation’. Wale is a doctoral candidate currently exploring machine learning and deep learning techniques that can be used to understand an influence campaign. He does not only play a crucial role in the development of various COSMOS social media analytics tools but is also sharing his knowledge with other students here at COSMOS and in the classroom. Thomas is the lead developer for the YouTubeTracker tool. He is pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science at University of Arkansas at LittleRead 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 University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor has received $230,000 to help defend the United States against the use of social bots.  Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair of Information Science, received the grant to develop a socio-computational model for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to detect the online presence of social bots. These bots automatically generate messages that persuade social media users on particular issues, ideas, and campaigns. Agarwal is working with Intelligent Automation, Inc., a company based in Rockville, Maryland, that specializes in research and development for federal agencies and corporations in the United States. Agarwal willRead More →