/news-archive/tag/serpil-tokdemir/ 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock Mon, 25 Feb 2019 17:23:48 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 /news-archive/2019/02/25/cosmos-best-paper-award-youtubes-digital-societies/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 17:23:48 +0000 /news/?p=73524 ... 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock researchers win best paper award for research on YouTube鈥檚 digital societies]]> 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.聽 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, 糖心Vlog传媒 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, 鈥淯nderstanding Digital Ethnography: Socio-computational Analysis of Trending YouTube Videos,鈥� 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 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock.]]> /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.聽 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. 聽 , a fifth-year doctoral student in information science, is the lead author for the paper. He is also a core researcher at (Collaboratorium for聽Social Media and Behavioral Studies), a research group led by, Jerry L.聽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. 聽 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聽demonstrated unique ways of tracking disinformation campaigns that leverage a聽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,聽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/2018/05/24/social-bots-natural-disasters/ Thu, 24 May 2018 13:01:28 +0000 /news/?p=70649 ... Social bots disrupt online communication about natural disasters]]> 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.聽 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, 鈥淎nalyzing Social Bots and their Coordination during Natural Disasters,鈥� will be discussed at the International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation to be held July 10-13 in Washington D.C. , a Ph.D. student in computer and information science at 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock, is the lead author who will present the paper. She is also a researcher at (Collaboratorium for Social Media and Behavioral Studies) 鈥� a research group led by Dr. Nitin Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Information Science. Khaund also presented this work at the 糖心Vlog传媒 Little Rock Student Research and Creative Works Showcase and was awarded first place in the graduate student technology division. The paper鈥檚 co-authors include Dr. Samer Al-Khateeb, a postdoctoral research fellow at COSMOS, Dr., a research project analyst at the office of Medicaid Inspector General and a postdoctoral research fellow at COSMOS, and Agarwal. Researchers collected data from Twitter during Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria as well as the 7.1-magnitude Central Mexico earthquake that killed 370 people on Sept. 19, 2017. The study resulted in the collection of more than 1.2 million tweets generated by more than 800,000 Twitter accounts. The researchers detected the presence of social bots in the collected dataset and studied the social networks of the top ranked bot accounts as well as the top ranked non-bot accounts (humans) and then compared both networks. They discovered that social bots, which evolve constantly and become more sophisticated as time progresses, can disrupt discourse in online spaces. While humans have more tightly knit online communities, social bots tend to make rather weaker connections that result in a lack of a sense of belonging in the online community. Analysis of their content revealed that the discourse was not just limited to the disaster events. Non-relevant hashtags including hoaxes and alternate narratives were latched on to the event-specific hashtags and were disseminated in Spanish, Arabic, French, and Japanese, among other languages. In future research, COSMOS investigators hope to understand the different strategies that social bots use to coordinate disinformation campaigns in which online discourse is successfully manipulated. The research is supported in part by grants from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Maulden-Entergy endowment at 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. Researchers gratefully acknowledge the support. ]]> /news-archive/2017/10/27/agarwal-honored-international-iaria-fellow/ Fri, 27 Oct 2017 13:24:46 +0000 /news/?p=68375 ... Agarwal honored as international IARIA fellow]]> 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鈥檚 events, and their continuous leadership roles in conferences. Agarwal, who also is the director of the 糖心Vlog传媒 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鈥檚 efforts to raise awareness regarding inequitable and gender-biased laws; Autism support groups鈥� 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鈥� radicalization and recruitment campaigns. During the conference, Agarwal delivered the conference鈥檚 Oct. 11 keynote address, 鈥淔ake News, Social Media, and Bots.鈥� 鈥淚 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鈥檚 rights issues to conducting deviant acts threatening democratic principles and institutions,鈥� Agarwal said. 鈥淚 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.鈥� 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, 鈥淒ealing with Citizen-centric Social News: A Behavioral View.鈥� 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鈥檚 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, 鈥淎ssessing Situation Awareness through Blogosphere: A Case Study on Venezuelan Socio-Political Crisis and the Migrant Influx,鈥� 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�Our analysis showed that the blogosphere is indeed being used as a platform for citizens to discuss these issues,鈥� Agarwal said. 鈥淥f 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.鈥�]]>