- University News Archive - ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

- University News Archive - ��Vlog��ý Little Rock /news-archive/tag/muhammad-nihal-hussain/ ��Vlog��ý Little Rock Mon, 25 Feb 2019 17:23:48 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 ��Vlog��ý Little Rock researchers win best paper award for research on YouTube’s digital societies /news-archive/2019/02/25/cosmos-best-paper-award-youtubes-digital-societies/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 17:23:48 +0000 /news/?p=73524 ...]]> Social media researchers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock have been recognized with the best paper award at an international conference for their research on the behavioral analysis of digital societies formed on the video-sharing platform YouTube.�� Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Science and director of the Collaboratorium of Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (), presented the paper that was co-authored by Muhammad Nihal Hussain, doctoral student in information science; Kiran Kumar Bandell, doctoral student in information science; Dr. Serpil Tokdemir, postdoctoral researcher at COSMOS; and Dr. Samer Al-khateeb, ��Vlog��ý Little Rock alumnus and assistant professor of computer science and informatics at Creighton University. YouTube is the second most popular website globally, and comments left on videos serve as a data source for researchers. The researchers studied the top 200 YouTube videos trending daily for a 40-day period separately in the United States and Great Britain, resulting in nearly an 8,000-video dataset for each region. This study sheds light on the digital ethnographic behaviors in terms of video-based content generation, sharing, and consumption. Trending videos in each geography region provided a glimpse of the interests of YouTube users. U.S. viewers are more interested in videos about comedy and sports, while those in Great Britain are more interested in sports videos. Additionally, videos in the Great Britain region, on average, have a longer lifespan and are shared more often on social media platforms compared to videos viewed by people in the U.S. In the future, the researchers plan to do a more in-depth study to look at the factors that explain the differences in content consumption in online sharing behaviors. The paper, “Understanding Digital Ethnography: Socio-computational Analysis of Trending YouTube Videos,” received the award at the eighth annual Social Media Technologies, Communication, and Informatics (SOTICS 2018), held in Nice, France, in October 2018. This is the fourth year in a row COSMOS researchers have won the best paper award at the SOTICS conference. The work was funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Office of Naval Research, U.S. Air Force Research Lab, U.S. Army Research Office, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Jerry L. Maulden/Entergy Endowment at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock.]]> Research explores how online narratives on refugees shift over time /news-archive/2018/03/27/online-narratives-refugees/ Tue, 27 Mar 2018 15:11:32 +0000 /news/?p=69838 ...]]> 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 workshop at the 40th annual, a premier conference in information retrieval, to be held March 26-29 in Grenoble, France. The lead author of the paper, , a fifth-year doctoral student in information science and a researcher at (Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies) – a research group led by Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Information Science, will travel to France to present the research at the conference. The researchers analyzed blogs to study a shift in narratives in the blogosphere toward refugees or migrants in Europe from 2015 to 2016. They used the tool to analyze more than 9,000 posts that talked about the influx of migrants and refugees from the Middle East and North African countries in Europe. “Social media is largely considered as a great democratizing platform,” Agarwal said. “However, not all voices are heard equally. Rather, only a few narratives get amplified, creating a democratic deficit. At a time where falsehoods travel faster and farther than truth, being able to computationally identify leading narratives would tremendously aid the information vetting process, helping the society in defeating disinformation.” Co-authors include, a third-year doctoral student in information science and a researcher at COSMOS, Dr. Samer Al-khateeb, postdoctoral research fellow at COSMOS, and Agarwal. “There has been little research carried out in the computational narratology domain, and this paper puts forward an interesting case in identifying shift in narratives with respect to an event to know what resonates in the blogosphere for a given time period,” Bandeli said. “We rely on computational concepts to study these shifts.” In this paper, the researchers used the migrant crisis in Europe as a case study to observe the change in sentiments of citizens toward migrants from positive (sympathetic and supportive) to negative (angry) and to understand the shift in a narrative on the blogosphere. �� “Conventionally, human effort is needed to read text to identify any narrative,” Hussain said. “This paper is a first step in computationally identifying a shift in narratives. Improving on this method and transferring this laborious task to machines will make the narrative analysis scalable.” In the future, the researchers plan to build a model to identify the narrative in any given online text. “Employing such a model to continuously monitor streaming social media content can help detect any deviant narratives like misinformation or propaganda,” Hussain said. “Being able to identify deviant narratives at an early stage can help stem the spread of deviance on social media and build effective counter-narratives.” This work is supported in part by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Office of Naval Research, U.S. Army Research Office, and the Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowment at the ��Vlog��ý-Little Rock. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in the study are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organizations.]]> ��Vlog��ý Little Rock student researcher is uncovering the secrets of the blogosphere /news-archive/2018/03/09/blogtrackers-cosmos/ Fri, 09 Mar 2018 14:54:46 +0000 /news/?p=69729 ...]]> In February, more than 409 million people read the over 20.8 billion pages posted on , 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 , a fifth-year doctoral student in information science and a core researcher at COSMOS (Collaboratorium for Social Media and Behavioral Studies) – a research group led by Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair of Information Science. In 2009, Agarwal developed a program called Blogtrackers, a tool designed to track and analyze blogs and gain insights from the blogosphere. Through Blogtrackers, COSMOS has been actively working on research studies that are supported by grants from the U.S. Office of Naval Research in the fight against cyber propaganda campaigns and ��tracked how anti-NATO groups reacted to information released during NATO’s exercises. Agarwal and Hussain also have trained NATO personnel to use Blogtrackers to analyze how false information and fake news stories are spread through social media. “There are not many universities who are analyzing blogs,” Hussain said. “Most just analyze Twitter, but they are missing out on a great social media platform. Almost all fake news is posted on blogs first and then linked to on Twitter. You cannot influence a person in 280 characters, but you can influence people through blog posts.” Hussain, a native of Hyderabad, India, graduated from Osmania University with a bachelor’s degree in information technology. While working as a systems engineer at Infosys, Hussain learned from a friend about research opportunities and graduate school options available at the College of Engineering and Information Technology at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock. �� “I had joined ��Vlog��ý Little Rock in 2014 to pursue my master’s degree in information quality with no intention to pursue a Ph.D., but the opportunity to work with Dr. Agarwal in COSMOS and developing the blog tracking tool led me to pursue my PhD. here,” he said. is currently in a beta stage and can only be accessed by researchers and others who have been trained to use it. However, Hussain is working to make Blogtrackers available for public use. “I want to set up an automated crawler in Blogtrackers so it can collect data on its own without much human intervention,” he said. “Once the pipeline is set up to collect data, it would allow people to set up their own data set of blogs and to analyze blogs for their own purposes.” In addition to researchers, Blogtrackers could be of great use to businesses, teachers, social scientists, journalists, public affairs personnel, and the military, Hussain noted. With Hussain set to graduate in December, he is pursuing opportunities to work in academia or for a research company. However, he would love to stay at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock to continue researching and developing Blogtrackers for public use in the near future. “I thank ��Vlog��ý Little Rock for introducing me to Dr. Agarwal,” he said. “��Vlog��ý Little Rock plays a big role in supporting these great research projects on campus. We are one of the very few universities in the country who are researching blogs. This cutting edge research will snowball into bigger things for the university and provide many research opportunities for students.” The Blogtrackers research project is supported in part by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Office of Naval Research, U.S. Air Force Research Lab, U.S. Army Research Office, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Jerry L. Maulden/Entergy Endowment at the ��Vlog��ý Little Rock. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding organizations. The researchers gratefully acknowledge the support.]]> Agarwal honored as international IARIA fellow /news-archive/2017/10/27/agarwal-honored-international-iaria-fellow/ Fri, 27 Oct 2017 13:24:46 +0000 /news/?p=68375 ...]]> Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy endowed chair and information science professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, was recently honored for a prestigious international fellowship for his achievements in social media and technology research. Agarwal was honored as a fellow of the International Academy, Research, and Industry Association (IARIA) during the held Oct. 8-12 in Athens, Greece. Every semester, the international organization for their outstanding research, their scientific contributions to the organization’s events, and their continuous leadership roles in conferences. Agarwal, who also is the director of the ��Vlog��ý Little Rock Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS), is highly respected for his social media research, and he continues to work with influential national and international organizations such as NATO, U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Lab, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the National Science Foundation. His research focuses on studying the role of socio-technical systems, especially social media in conducting cyber campaigns such as Saudi Women’s efforts to raise awareness regarding inequitable and gender-biased laws; Autism support groups’ efforts to debunk misinformation campaigns run by anti-vaccine groups; anti-West, anti-NATO disinformation campaigns run by pro-Russian media and groups; and ISIS’ radicalization and recruitment campaigns. During the conference, Agarwal delivered the conference’s Oct. 11 keynote address, “Fake News, Social Media, and Bots.” “I talked about the various research efforts at COSMOS, primarily our studies on examining mobilization and coordination of information campaigns ranging from awareness of the autism spectrum disorder to women’s rights issues to conducting deviant acts threatening democratic principles and institutions,” Agarwal said. “I spoke in depth about our studies supported by several DoD (Department of Defense) multi-year grants, on examining how social media is used for weaponizing narratives, manipulating discourse through misinformation or disinformation campaigns, recruitment, and radicalization, and the fake news phenomenon.” Agarwal also talked about how social media analysis tools and methodologies he and his team have developed are used by Department of Defense employees, NATO public affairs officers, and strategic communication officers. Most recently, COSMOS began working with George Mason University to establish a Department of Homeland Security-funded Center for Crime Investigation and Network Analysis. The center will study the role of the dark web, dark markets, and crypto currencies by transnational crime organizations to influence thinking, provoke hysteria and chaos, and affect instability. Additionally, Agarwal moderated a panel, “Dealing with Citizen-centric Social News: A Behavioral View.” The panel brought experts from telecommunication, computational science, and information science domains who have tremendous expertise in understanding socio-technical behavior evolution. The panel aimed to present a well-rounded perspective of social media’s role in citizen journalistic efforts in news production, distribution, and consumption. , research project analyst at the Office of Medicaid Inspector General in Little Rock and research associate at COSMOS, also served on the panel. Agarwal also presented a paper co-authored with his doctoral students, Esther Mead, , Samer Al-khateeb, and Mohammad Shiblee Nooman. The paper, “Assessing Situation Awareness through Blogosphere: A Case Study on Venezuelan Socio-Political Crisis and the Migrant Influx,” 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 from a Venezuelan community collected between August 2003 to March 2017 to determine if Venezuelan blogs were indeed discussing concerns in the region and possible migration due to these concerns. “Our analysis showed that the blogosphere is indeed being used as a platform for citizens to discuss these issues,” Agarwal said. “Of particular interest is the keyword trend analysis that shows that blogs are being used to discuss issues associated with quality of life and interest in migration away from Venezuela as a result of the crisis. We believe that this study can be used as a starting point to show the value of analyzing blogs in facilitating humanitarian assistance efforts.”]]>