Nitin Agarwal

Nitin Agarwal is the Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Information Science at University of Arkansas-Little Rock. He is the director of the Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS). His research focuses on studying the role of socio-technical systems, especially social media, in conducting cyber campaigns. His research has examined various cyber campaigns such as Saudi Women’s efforts to raise awareness about the inequitable and gender-biased laws; Autism support groups’ efforts to debunk misinformation campaigns run by anti-vaxxers groups; anti-West, anti-NATO disinformation campaigns run by pro-Russian media and groups; and ISIS’ radicalization and recruitment campaigns. Supported by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Army Research Office (ARO), Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research is grounded in the social science theories of cyber collective action, social identity formation, resource mobilization, and social movement spillover and leverages concepts from computational sciences including machine learning, data mining, graph mining, social network analysis, content analysis, and natural language processing. The research has resulted in 5 books and over 100 peer-reviewed publications at various prestigious forums including journal articles, book chapters/encyclopedia entries, and conference proceeding papers. The research studies have resulted in Best Information System Publication of 2012 Award recognized by the AIS Senior Scholar Consortium, several Best Paper Awards and best paper nominees. Dr. Agarwal has developed Blogtrackers tool to analyze blogs to help identify key information actors, opinion leaders, leading narratives during information campaigns, and study how those narratives spread through myriad forms of social media. Dr. Agarwal is chairing the Socio-Cognitive Security Working Group under the auspices of the NSF South Big Data Hub. Dr. Agarwal collaborates with NATO’s Strategic Communications (STRATCOM) Center of Excellence to support their efforts to stem the tide of mis/disinformation and conduct training of social media analysis tools for them. Dr. Agarwal obtained Ph.D. from Arizona State University with outstanding dissertation recognition. He was recognized as one of 'The New Influentials: 20 In Their 20s' by Arkansas Business in 2011. He was recognized with the University-wide Faculty Excellence Award in Research and Creative Endeavors in 2015. Dr. Agarwal received the Social Media 2015 Educator of the Year Award at the 21st International Education and Technology Conference, Hong Kong SAR, China. He is an International Academy, Research and Industry Association (IARIA) Fellow. Visit http://ualr.edu/nxagarwal/ for more details.

Publications

Assessing Social Support and Stress in Autism-Focused Virtual Communities: Emerging Research and Opportunities
Assessing Social Support and Stress in Autism-Focused Virtual Communities: Emerging Research and Opportunities
Amit Saha, Nitin Agarwal. © 2018. 131 pages.
With the high prevalence of autism spectrum disorders among the younger generation, there is a shortage of adequate resources to deliver care for these individuals. Therefore...
A Subspace Clustering Framework for Research Group Collaboration
A Subspace Clustering Framework for Research Group Collaboration
Nitin Agarwal, Ehtesham Haque, Huan Liu, Lance Parsons. © 2006. 24 pages.
Researchers spend considerable time searching for relevant papers on the topic in which they are currently interested. Often, despite having similar interests, researchers in the...