/news-archive/tag/nihal-hussain/ 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock Wed, 22 Aug 2018 15:14:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 /news-archive/2018/08/22/research-tracking-disinformation-campaigns-social-media/ Wed, 22 Aug 2018 15:14:34 +0000 /news/?p=71418 ... 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock paper wins award at international conference for research on tracking disinformation campaigns through social media]]> A 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock research paper on strategic integrations of social media platforms received the Challenge Problem Runner Up award at the 2018 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation this summer.听 The research project, 鈥淓xamining Strategic Integrations of Social Media Platforms in Tracking Disinformation Campaign Coordination,鈥� explores the role of media orchestration strategies in conducting disinformation campaigns. It was presented July 11-13 at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. 听 , a fifth-year doctoral student in information science, is the lead author for the paper. He is also a core researcher at (Collaboratorium for听Social Media and Behavioral Studies), a research group led by, Jerry L.听Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair of Information Science. The paper鈥檚 co-authors include Kiran Kumar Bandeli, a third-year doctoral student in information science and a researcher at COSMOS,, former postdoctoral research fellow at COSMOS who is now an assistant professor of computer science at Creighton University, Dr., a research project analyst at the office of Medicaid Inspector General and a postdoctoral research fellow at COSMOS, and Agarwal. The research presents an in-depth examination of the information networks using social network analysis and cyber forensic based methodology to identify prominent information actors and leading coordinators of the disinformation campaigns. 听 鈥淢ost researchers focus on one platform to study disinformation, but dissemination strategies have evolved,鈥� Hussain said. 鈥淢ultiple social media platforms are used in coordination to maximize disinformation diffusion. This paper is a step towards identifying these complex strategies. We plan to continue to monitor and identify disinformation dissemination strategies as they evolve.鈥� Using the developed research methodology, the study reveals a massive disinformation coordination campaign pertaining to the Baltic region conducted primarily on blogs, but strategically linking to a variety of other social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and VKontakte. 鈥淐urrently, the United States and our global partners are in the infancy of where participatory media, technology, and policy meet 鈥� a lawless Wild West of social media,鈥� Agarwal said. 鈥淭his calls for rigorous studies on sociotechnical behavioral modeling, content generation and regulation in social media, cyber-threat assessment, social cyber security, cyber-diplomacy, cyber-human systems, and social computing technologies in general, to develop methodologies to diagnose novel pathologies of online social media This research is a step towards that direction.鈥� The researchers note that at a time when people rely on social media to consume news more than the mainstream media, irresponsible citizen journalism poses a threat to democratic principles and institutions by misrepresenting facts and information. Using,, and tools, the team听demonstrated unique ways of tracking disinformation campaigns that leverage a听mix of various social media platforms to coordinate the campaigns. This research is funded in part by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, U.S. Army Research Office, U.S. Air Force Research Lab, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Jerry L. Maulden/Entergy Endowment at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Researchers are grateful to the support. In the upper right photo,听Muhammad Nihal Hussain, a fifth-year doctoral student in information science, presents the paper at the 2018 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation this summer.]]> /news-archive/2018/03/09/blogtrackers-cosmos/ Fri, 09 Mar 2018 14:54:46 +0000 /news/?p=69729 ... 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock student researcher is uncovering the secrets of the blogosphere]]> 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.听 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听tracked how anti-NATO groups reacted to information released during NATO鈥檚 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. 鈥淭here are not many universities who are analyzing blogs,鈥� Hussain said. 鈥淢ost 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.鈥� Hussain, a native of Hyderabad, India, graduated from Osmania University with a bachelor鈥檚 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 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock. 听 鈥淚 had joined 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock in 2014 to pursue my master鈥檚 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,鈥� 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. 鈥淚 want to set up an automated crawler in Blogtrackers so it can collect data on its own without much human intervention,鈥� he said. 鈥淥nce 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.鈥� 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 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock to continue researching and developing Blogtrackers for public use in the near future. 鈥淚 thank 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock for introducing me to Dr. Agarwal,鈥� he said. 鈥溙切腣log传媒 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.鈥� 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 糖心Vlog传媒 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.]]> /news-archive/2017/12/05/cosmos-best-paper-award/ Tue, 05 Dec 2017 14:19:44 +0000 /news/?p=68721 ... Team COSMOS wins Best Paper Award at conference]]> 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鈥� 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, 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 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. 鈥淭his paper establishes the basis for using blog analysis for studying socio-political awareness, presenting the Venezuelan economic crisis as an example,鈥� Mead said. 鈥� Our decision to write this paper was sparked by our motivation to highlight the blogosphere as a legitimate starting point for extracting social media data for discovering trends and valuable insights about populations.鈥� The analysis revealed that the frequency and content of posts change over time, reflecting changes in the socio-political landscape of the region, such as protests, the decline in quality of life factors like food and medicine, and interest in migration from Venezuela, Mead said. 听 鈥淭his paper sets the stage for future work using Blogtrackers and other natural language processing tools and techniques for blog analysis as a possible approach for anticipating events, like protests, migration, and refugee scenarios,鈥� Mead said. 鈥淭his information can provide actionable insights to emergency responders, humanitarian assistance organizations, and policy and decision makers.鈥� All of the paper鈥檚 co-authors are members of the 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS), led by Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Maulden-Entergy Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Science. 听 Co-authors include Agarwal, Muhammad Nihal Hussain, doctoral student from Hyderabad, India, studying computer and information science; Mohammad Shiblee Nooman, master鈥檚 student from Dhaka, Bangladesh, majoring in information quality; and Samer Al-khateeb, doctoral student from Baghdad, Iraq, studying computer and information science. The paper was presented at the Seventh International Conference on Social Media Technologies, Communication, and Informatics held Oct. 8-12 in Athens, Greece. This is the third year in a row that a researcher from COSMOS has won the Best Paper Award from an IARIA conference. The research is 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 Fund at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. ]]>