Winning at the Front of the Frontline

[Per a release from UA Little Rock with editorial input from Arkansas Research Alliance]

ARA Academy Member Dr. Nitin Agarwal Leads COSMOS to a $5M Research Grant

Nestled innocuously on the UA Little Rock campus, a stalwart division of the university's computer science department wages a counter-offensive against wave after wave of misinformation that contaminates our social media feeds. Founded in 2015, the Collaboration for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS) is the "vanguard of the ever-evolving field of social computing that brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers from over 15 countries." It is led by ARA Academy member Dr. Nitin Agarwal, an esteemed professor of Information Science at UA Little Rock.

Eight years after its inception, COSMOS continues to make headlines. UA Little Rock announced that COSMOS has received $5 million from the Army Research Office to evaluate and defend against emerging cognitive threats. The Army Research Office is a directorate of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory.

The project, set to run through 2025, aims to identify research gaps in deviant socio-technical behaviors, shape an agenda focused on developing strategies that can counter emerging threats, and create tools for near real-time analysis of such threats.?

?“Narratives on social media could be easily weaponized and propagated at frighteningly fast speeds,” Agarwal said. “Such insidious threats that attempt to influence beliefs and behaviors need to be considered as modern weapons of cognitive hijacking. We need to develop scientific approaches to combat these emerging threats in a global context, equip our warfighters with these capabilities, and strengthen community resiliency.”

Arkansas Research Alliance started a close friendship with Dr. Agarwal in 2018, when he was named an ARA Fellow and inducted to the ARA Academy. It was evident that his research held fascinating possibilities. According to Dr. Agarwal, it was possible to predict outbreaks of disease, economic downturn, rioting, terrorism and even local violence by analyzing a broad spectrum of social media behaviors.

"We've seen a rise of the so-called deviant mobs, weaponization of information, radical and extremist groups, propaganda dissemination, misinformation, fake news and the like," said Dr. Agarwal. "Our research sheds light on these variegated behaviors that manifest in digital and cyber spaces. This is a highly interdisciplinary research endeavor that lies at the intersection of social computing, behavior-cultural modeling, collective action, social cyber forensics, artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning, smart health and privacy."

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Agarwal and his team put research into service by launching a public-use COVID Misinformation Tracker that helped the public parse misinformation from legitimate facts about the virus and its treatment. ARA worked to not only provide funding for the project, but also connect Dr. Agarwal with the Arkansas Attorney General Office for support.

Identifying misinformation is useful, but the global potential of COSMOS applications are impressive. Imagine having the ability to analyze social media data so we could preemptively identify emerging threats – perhaps a pending military attack or an act of terrorism. Such applications have piqued the interest of the U.S. Military, which is why the U.S. Army has approved the funding of Dr. Agarwal's research.

?“Given the evolving technological landscape and increasing complexity of cognitive attacks, research is warranted to develop multidisciplinary and theoretically grounded capabilities to evaluate emerging socio-cognitive threats that can serve the needs of our military at strategic, tactical, and operational levels,” Agarwal said.

Agarwal says these threats are increasingly flash mob-type events, where groups self-organize and coordinate in cyberspace, then disperse. Coordinated cognitive attacks can cause stock market frenzy, violent protests, highly coordinated cyberattacks on public infrastructure, for instance. To an outsider such acts may look arbitrary, however intense coordination happens in the background.

When narratives rapidly evolve in an unchecked online environment, the results can be dangerous. State and non-state actors, alike, can use social media platforms to amplify certain narratives and sway public opinion in their favor. Some of Agarwal’s previous research has shown how YouTube’s algorithms can be manipulated to promote positive content about China while crushing negative news like human rights violations against Uyghur minorities in western China, or how the terrorist organization, Islamic State, uses bots to recruit members and for propaganda campaigns.

"There are many popular shows about the use of forensics to solve physical crimes. Somewhat similarly, Dr. Agarwal uses social cyber forensics to determine the sources of scams and influence campaigns, some of which threaten our country and its allies,” said Dr. Lawrence Whitman, dean of the Donaghey College of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. “He works closely with the Army to apply the methods and tools his team has developed to make us all safer. It's great to have Dr. Agarwal working on these threats, and we are grateful to have this partnership with the Army Research Office."

Agarwal’s research team investigates governments, groups, and individuals who use advanced communication tactics to orchestrate sophisticated cognitive attack campaigns through a variety of existing and emerging social media platforms, particularly multimedia-rich platforms.?

U.S. defense groups are interested in the work because it helps to identify how adversaries are promoting certain narratives via social media, how such narratives resonate with the target audience, and how those narratives can be combated.?Training exercises will be conducted to enhance the U.S. workforce with skills in big data analytics, data management, machine learning, and artificial intelligence with applications in security.

?The award will provide support for high-speed computational servers that are necessary to support the processing of large volumes of multimodality data, which includes text, image, video, audio, reach, engagement, metadata, and interactions. It is also expected to fund around 15 student research positions, several postdoctoral research fellowships, and data engineer positions.

?“The funds will help create exciting opportunities for our students and research staff by exposing them to real world problems and stimulating them to develop science-based solutions,” Agarwal said.

Dr. Agarwal is a member of the ARA Academy of Scholars and Fellows, who supports his research through collaboration, connection and grants, including the ARA Impact Grant to support the development of a framework for multiplatform misinformation campaign analysis.