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

��Vlog��ý Little Rock student researches the role of Argentinian films in LGBTQ rights

Ajani Oyindamola — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 19:09:21 +0000

A University of Arkansas at Little Rock student spent the summer at a prestigious study abroad program where he examined Argentina’s films to determine the role they play in citizens’ LGBTQ rights. Dylan Wright, a junior Spanish and political science double major from Little Rock, attended the School for International Training through the study abroad program, “Argentina: Human Rights and Social Media,” from March through June. “I didn’t want to just study Spanish,” Wright said. “I looked for programs that were taught in Spanish, and I was very interested in human rights. I found a program based in Buenos Aires that was taught in Spanish and studied human rights. It was really interesting to see Argentina’s human rights history up close.” The law regarding human rights in Argentina is unique since the country included several international human rights treaties into its constitution in 1994, which resulted in the importation of international law into the country’s legal system. “They are at the forefront of human rights in many areas. People talk about human rights there all the time; things that people in the U.S. would not realize they have human rights to. Even on the buses, there is a sticker on the bus outlining the human rights that pertain to transportation. Everyone has the right to health care. They don’t view it as a privilege. They view it as a fundamental right.” Wright completed his research paper this semester under the mentorship of Dr. Erin Finzer, associate professor of Spanish and associate vice chancellor for academic affairs. He plans to present the paper, “Framing LGBTQ Rights: Critical Film Perspectives in the Argentine Queer Community,” at a conference in the spring 2019 semester. Through the study of Argentine film, particularly the Latin American film movement known as Third Cinema, as well as through the concept of cultural agency, Wright worked to enhance and develop an understanding of the role that art and culture can play in advancing civil rights and social equality.

Dylan Wright (left) and a fellow student take a walk near a Mapuche organization’s headquarters in Bariloche, Argentina, a largely tourist town known for its Swiss colonial influence.

“Third Cinema developed in Argentina. The people who first coined the term were film directors from Argentina in 1968 and 1969,” Wright said. “After the dictatorship ended, there was a big call for cultural products that opposed the dictatorship. I looked at independent queer cinema in Argentina. It was interesting to look at how the directors implicitly took inspiration from Third Cinema’s tropes and styles. I interviewed one film director, one film historian, and an artistic director of a film festival that focuses on queer cinema.” In the spring 2019 semester, Wright will put his language skills to use in another international human rights project. He received a Signature Research Experience Award to work with Dr. Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm, associate professor in the School of Public Affairs, who is examining truth commissions in 11 Latin American countries, including Argentina, which were created to investigate human rights violations committed during military dictatorships or during civil wars in the region. “We are looking for the truth in what happened during the dictatorships in these 11 countries,” he said. “Since Eric does not speak Spanish, I will use textual analysis to see what language might have been more effective in these truth commission reports and what might have been copied from other reports.” Through the project, Wright will learn new research methodologies. Wright, who is currently taking a human rights course with Wiebelhaus-Brahm, is interested in how international law can be used to help people who have suffered human rights violations. “I am really interested in human rights in general,” Wright said. “Since I speak Spanish, it’s easier to focus on Latin American commissions. There is a push for truth there that isn’t in a lot of the rest of the world. I am interested in how international law can make tangible differences in people’s lives in a way that is not arcane.” After graduation from ��Vlog��ý Little Rock in 2019, Wright plans to attend a graduate program in law and public policy to eventually work in the field of civil and human rights. In the upper right photo, Dylan Wright overlooks Esquel in Argentina’s Chubut province, where he and fellow students learned about local organized resistance to large mines.

��Vlog��ý Little Rock professor joins program to fight the spread of foreign propaganda

Ajani Oyindamola — Fri, 25 May 2018 16:25:16 +0000

University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor and social media infiltration expert Dr. Nitin Agarwal has been selected as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Tech Demo program to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation. Agarwal, Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Information Science, leads (Collaboratorium for Social Media and Behavioral Studies) at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock. Agarwal’s team of researchers is one of 14 groups throughout the country that is participating in the program, which is organized by the that is charged with leading the U.S. government’s efforts to counter propaganda and disinformation from international terrorist organizations and foreign countries. During the next six months, those participating in the program will be invited to present their research to U.S. State Department officials, who are expected to visit ��Vlog��ý Little Rock in November. Agarwal and COSMOS researchers will showcase technologies like Blogtrackers and YouTube trackers, one of COSMOS’ latest applications. These applications track information providers and narratives as misinformation is disseminated through social media networks including blogs, YouTube, and Twitter. The research is the result of projects supported by millions of dollars in federal grants. YouTube trackers demonstrates expansion in COSMOS’ research goals from understanding how people consume media via reading to including viewing-oriented information consumption. “The younger generations consume information more by viewing than reading, so they are becoming susceptible to disinformation that is prevalent on video-based social media platforms,” he said. The key to the success of programs like Blogtrackers and YouTube trackers is developing efficient algorithms that can quickly sift through massive amounts of social media data, but also target the right signals, Agarwal said. “There are often two main motivations for using YouTube,” he said. “One motivation is monetization. People can make a lot of money off of YouTube, so they want their content displayed in as many places as possible. The second motivation is manipulation. There are also malicious or adversarial actors who eventually want to steer your thinking toward a specific agenda. Once you know the intent of the users, we can pick up the right signals to acquire relevant data.” Algorithmic warfare is becoming an increasingly hot topic as companies like Google, Twitter, and YouTube have realized that the algorithms they use to search and recommend content to their users are susceptible to manipulation by outside forces, Agarwal said. As an example, hackers could target Google’s search algorithms to make a website with false information appear higher in search results, therefore making the website look legitimate. Agarwal attended the technology series’ kickoff event May 2 at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. Acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs spoke at the event and emphasized the importance of this initiative as a way that the government is working with private industry to stem the spread of false narratives and to authenticate emerging information. “Foreign propaganda and disinformation clearly is not a new problem,” Nauert said. “However, the same technology that has put an ever-growing crowd-sourced encyclopedia in the hands of anyone with an internet connection, has also put a multimedia storyteller in almost everyone’s pocket. It is not always clear which messages may be sponsored by foreign governments or non-state actors. In this charged atmosphere, information – or more frequently its weaponized counterpart, disinformation – is emerging as the secret weapon used by our adversaries to tip the scales. We are at a crucial moment when we must define the problem and develop effective solutions consistent with the rule of law and our democratic norms and values. And we need the folks in this room to help us in that endeavor.”

Social bots disrupt online communication about natural disasters

Ajani Oyindamola — Thu, 24 May 2018 13:01:28 +0000

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 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 ��Vlog��ý Little Rock, is the lead author who will present the paper. She is also a researcher at (Collaboratorium for Social Media and Behavioral Studies) – 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 ��Vlog��ý Little Rock Student Research and Creative Works Showcase and was awarded first place in the graduate student technology division. The paper’s 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 ��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. Researchers gratefully acknowledge the support.

��Vlog��ýLR researchers present findings at NATO conference

Ajani Oyindamola — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 17:54:19 +0000

A University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor and two doctoral students recently got a chance to unveil their research on cyber defense at an international NATO conference. Dr. Nitin Agarwal, the ��Vlog��ýLR Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy endowed chair and a professor of information science, and his doctoral students, Samer Al-Khateeb and Nihal Hussain, presented their research at the NATO Technology for Information, Decision, and Execution (TIDE) Sprint Conference Oct. 26 in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The conference serves as an initiative to achieve and maintain technology, information, and decision making in support of NATO’s command and control development efforts. The talk, “Understanding Influence Operations of Novorossiya through Blogs and Twitter,” detailed the research team’s monitoring of social media responses to NATO exercises Operation Brilliant Jump and Anakonda over the summer. Specifically, they tracked how anti-NATO groups reacted to information released by NATO and media coverage of the exercises via social media. “We documented and described various case studies pertaining to the Novorossiya context, especially the anti-NATO narrative propagated by the pro-Russian media outlets,” Agarwal said. It’s important to monitor misinformation spread through social media, since deviant groups can coordinate cyber campaigns to influence thinking and media coverage of events, Agarwal said. “In today’s information technology age, our thinking and behaviors are highly influenced by what we see on our smartphone screens,” Agarwal said. “Misinformation is rampant. Complemented with the availability of inexpensive and ubiquitous mass communication tools, such as social media, conducting deviant acts becomes both convenient and effective.” The researchers used social network analysis and cyber forensics to develop tools and methodologies to find hidden relations between different groups and track deviant groups across social media websites, Al-Khateeb said. For instance, their research can identify the influential people in a social network who are most responsible for spreading false information in a cyber campaign. They can also track how this information is spread from one social network to another. For example, narratives can be framed on blogs and YouTube videos and then that information can be disseminated through Twitter and Reddit. “Blogs provide a rich medium for presenting a story with half-truths and misinformation, which are then disseminated using Twitter or Facebook. Identifying these cross-media affiliations is important to build a complete picture,” Hussain said. The work is funded in part by a $186,692 grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, titled “Analyzing Integrated Social Media-Facilitated Propaganda Campaigns Using Social Network Analysis and Cyber Forensics,” and a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Army Research Office, titled “Towards Predictive Modeling Deviant Cyber Flash Mobs: A Socio-Informatics Driven Hypergraph Framework.” The grant builds on Agarwal’s already significant body of social media research and behavioral modeling. It is part of a larger research program in his Center Of Social Media and Online behavioral Studies (COSMOS) lab. More information on these projects can be found on Agarwal’s project website. More information about the researchers: Agarwal is the Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy Chair Professor of Information Science at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is the director of Center of Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies. His research interests include social computing, data mining, privacy, social-cyber security, and health informatics. He has published widely in top-tier forums with several best paper awards. His research is supported by grants from the U.S. NSF, ONR, AFRL, and ARO. Agarwal obtained his Ph.D. from Arizona State University with outstanding dissertation recognition in 2009. He was awarded Top 20 in 20s by Arkansas Business Magazine in 2012. ��Vlog��ýLR awarded Agarwal the 2015 Faculty Excellence Award for Research and Creative Endeavors. Al-Khateeb is pursuing his doctorate in computer and information sciences. His research includes deviant behavioral modeling, deviant cyber flash mobs, cyber propaganda campaigns, social cyber forensics, social computing, data mining in social media, and collective action. He received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in applied science from ��Vlog��ýLR and is a recipient of the outstanding master’s student award from the College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences. Hussain is pursuing his doctorate in integrated computing at ��Vlog��ýLR. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Osmania University. He also works as a research assistant in the information science department, and his research interests include text mining and unstructured data mining. In the upper right photo, Dr. Nitin Agarwal (left) and his doctoral students, Nihal Hussain and Samer Al-Khateeb, presented their research at the NATO Technology for Information, Decision, and Execution (TIDE) Sprint Conference Oct. 26 in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Photo by Lonnie Timmons III/��Vlog��ýLR Communications.

��Vlog��ýLR student researches privacy awareness on social media

Ajani Oyindamola — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 14:55:18 +0000

A University of Arkansas at Little Rock doctoral student is out to discover how knowledgeable people are about their privacy on social media. Terry Williams, a doctoral student in the integrated computing program, is using a series of surveys and privacy awareness tips to investigate privacy awareness and social media in her dissertation, “A Study of Privacy Awareness in the Digital Age and the Influence of Knowledge Over Time.” Williams became interested in studying privacy when she began encountering targeted advertising, tracking technology that lets companies target online advertisements based on consumers’ previous Internet activities. “A couple of years ago, I thought I needed some black boots, so I go to Zappos,” she said. “Later on, I was on some news site, and there are ads about little black boots. I thought it was creepy that they are following me online. It didn’t stop me from shopping online, but all the bazillion bits of information about me are out there.” Many people are protective of personal information like phone numbers, addresses, credit cards, and Social Security numbers. However, companies track everything that people do on the internet, from web searches and online shopping to “likes” on Facebook and retweets on Twitter.

Terry Williams

“It’s really much bigger than that,” Williams said. “It’s not just your identifying information, it’s about everything you do on the internet. The vast majority of people don’t even understand how much information companies have on them.” Dr. Nitin Agarwal, the ��Vlog��ýLR Jerry L. Maulden-Entergy endowed chair and a professor of information science and Williams’ dissertation adviser, said internet users easily find themselves at risk of oversharing information. “It is unreasonable to expect social media companies to intervene and reverse the information-sharing behaviors,” Agarwal said. “But as information privacy researchers and policy makers, we owe it to ourselves that we educate others and spread awareness about these risks. Terry’s research is a step forward in this direction. The research will inform privacy awareness education and training programs, policy and decision making, and general awareness about information sharing.” Williams earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and an MBA from the University of Memphis. She has spent her career working in a variety of information technology leadership roles, including more than a decade as the information technology manager at the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory. After becoming an adjunct instructor for ITT Technical Institute in 2001, Williams discovered a love of teaching and pursued her doctorate at ��Vlog��ýLR to become a university professor. For more information on the study or to participate, visit.

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

����Vlog��ý Little Rock student researches the role of Argentinian films in LGBTQ rights

����Vlog��ý Little Rock professor joins program to fight the spread of foreign propaganda