Michael is an Application Devleoper Assistant at the U of A System Division of Agriculture.
He has represented UA Little Rock at several Hackathons. Most recently, he won the J.B.
Hunt’s Use Case Challenge at the UA Blockchain Hackathon in September 2018. His work
at CrimsonHacks 2017 and 2018 at the University of Alabama was rewarded with the win
for best use of AWS. His team has represented the UA Little Rock Information Science
department at the JOLT! Hackathon, Shell on the Border 2018 and HackHLTH in Las Vegas
in May 2018.
As of May 2017, he graduated as an EAST scholar of UA Little Rock with a Bachelor
of Science degree in e-commerce minoring in information technology. As he pursued
his degree, Richard gained hands-on experience with skills specific to data visualization,
web development, UI/UX design, and mobile-first design. Since graduation, he has stayed
actively enrolled in several self-taught classes through online platforms which have
aided in his pursuit to gather knowledge in the fields of Python development, Google
Analytics, data illustration, graphic design, and data storytelling. He is currently
pursuing a master’s degree in information science applying his skills and interests
toward his graduate research assistantship for the team at COSMOS.
http://cosmos.ualr.edu/about/richard/
Phil H Williams is the Bioinformatics Technical Director at the MidSouth Bioinformatics
Center at UA Little Rock. This is a core facility for the joint UA Little Rock, UAMS
bioinformatics program. Phil received his PhD from the joint UA Little Rock, UAMS
bioinformatics program. He also has an M.S. in Applied Science Instrumentation from
UA Little Rock and a B.S. in biology with minor in chemistry is from Arkansas State
University, Jonesboro. Phil did a postdoc at the Australian National University in
Canberra. Research interest include function prediction for long-noncoding RNA (lncRNA)
as well as interaction between microRNAs and lncRNA. The relationship between epigenetics,
retrotransposons and lncRNA, are also of interest.
Hayder is pursuing his Masters in Applied Science at UA Little Rock. He graduated
from Al Nahrain University in Bagdad, Iraq, with a bachelor's degree and master's
degree in computer science. His extensive studies focused on web technologies.
Phil H Williams is the Bioinformatics Technical Director at the MidSouth Bioinformatics
Center at UA Little Rock. This is a core facility for the joint UA Little Rock, UAMS
bioinformatics program. Phil received his PhD from the joint UA Little Rock, UAMS
bioinformatics program. He also has an M.S. in Applied Science Instrumentation from
UA Little Rock and a B.S. in biology with minor in chemistry is from Arkansas State
University, Jonesboro. Phil did a postdoc at the Australian National University in
Canberra. Research interest include function prediction for long-noncoding RNA (lncRNA)
as well as interaction between microRNAs and lncRNA. The relationship between epigenetics,
retrotransposons and lncRNA, are also of interest.
Muhammad Nihal Hussain (Computer and Information Sciences PhD candidate and a core
researcher at the Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS)
studies disinformation and crowd manipulation strategies on YouTube and Blogs. His
research interests include event analysis, cross-media information diffusion, text
mining and social computing. Hussain has been collecting and analyzing social media
data for over 4 years and has published his findings at various reputable conferences.
Hussain has worked on various projects including analyzing blogosphere to understand
the opinions and adversarial narratives around NATO’s various events and exercises.
He has given tutorials on blogosphere analysis at SBP-BRiMS, NATO TIDE Sprint and
"Social media course" organized by NATO STRATCOM COE (Riga, Latvia).
Kiran Kumar Bandeli is currently a PhD Candidate at the Collaboratorium of Social
Media and Online Behavioral Studies (COSMOS) at University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Kiran's general research area is social media data analysis, social computing and
network analysis. His research interests include behavior modeling of users on various
social media platforms, and thematic analysis on blogs. Lately Kiran is working on
event based analysis in blogs. Kiran has co-authored more than 10 papers that include
research on - disinformation activities on blogs, challenges and opportunities in
blog data collection, analyzing shift in narratives, strategic integration of social
media platforms in disinformation campaign coordination, and socio-computational analysis
of YouTube videos. Kiran’s work was recently published in NATO Strategic Communications
Center of Excellence (StratCom COE) and Journal of NATO Defence Strategic Communications.
Brenda Chepkorir is a Junior Information Science Major at UA Little Rock. She is part of
the College of Engineering's Student Leadership Board as a representative for the
Information Science Department. She works as an Application Development Intern on
J.B. Hunt Transport, Inc.'s Emerging Technologies Team. She specializes in and has
a love for JavaScript.
Tuja Khaund is a PhD student at the Collaboratorium of Social Media and Online Behavioral
Studies (COSMOS) at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Her research focuses on
social media data analysis, social computing and network analysis. More specifically,
Tuja's research includes analyzing behavior of autonomous accounts (bots) on social media
platforms such as Twitter, and cyber forensic analysis for blog identification. Cyber
Forensics detects hidden digital footprints of a website, a user, or an organization.
Tuja recently published two papers on the analysis of social bots and their coordination
during various major events. Tuja's contribution to NATO's Trident Juncture 2018 includes analysis of Anti-NATO Blogs
where she identified ‘blog farms’ via Tracker Codes whose sole purpose is to alter
search engine results to push their content out to a larger crowd. Her work also helped
detect cross-media information dissemination which was used by these Anti-NATO Blogs
to coordinate on a greater scale.
