The Postdoctoral Fellow position is a full-time provisional position with the COSMOS Research Center (cosmos.ualr.edu) at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, and is funded through a grant or contract. The position renewal is contingent upon continued grant funding and satisfactory job performance.
The Postdoctoral Fellow will develop socio-computational models to advance our understanding of cyber campaigns run on social media grounded in the dynamics of various social and communication processes such as group formation, activation, decentralized decision-making, and collective action.
Leveraging cyber forensics and deep web search-based methodologies, the postdoctoral fellow will help extract relevant open-source information in a guided snowball data collection manner. Postdoctoral Fellow will work with the research team in developing predictive models of various socio-technical behaviors on different social media platforms (including, multimedia-rich platforms), usable tools/software to identify key actors and key groups responsible for coordinating cyber campaigns and disseminating propaganda.
This is an on-campus position and will report to: Dr. Nitin Agarwal (nxagarwal@ualr.edu), Maulden-Entergy Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor and Director, COSMOS Research Center, UA-Little Rock. This position is governed by state and federal laws, and agency/institution policy.
Qualifications:
Required Education and/or Experience:
- The candidate must have a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Information Science, or a related discipline;
- The candidate should have at least one year research experience in social media mining, computational modeling of social science theories, working with social network analysis tools, and examining cyber campaigns conducted on social media.
Preferred Education and/or Experience:
- A candidate with extensive research experience in computer programming and data management will be given preference.
Job Duties and Responsibilities:
- Assist with social media analysis for the research projects, hypothesis generation, and evaluation for understanding cyber behaviors, data collection, cleaning, preprocessing, analyzing findings from the data, writing research findings, and presenting the research at conferences, scientific venues, program reviews, and other venues;
- Write software modules transitioning research to tool;
- Assist with multimedia-rich online information environment analysis;
- Help with training the stakeholders on research and tools;
- Mentor and monitor graduate and undergraduate students working on the project – an experience that will help the person prepare for a successful academic career afterward;
- Assist in preparing reports and publications;
- Assist in grant writing;
- Coordinate meetings and lead discussions;
- Record minutes of the meetings; and
- Work on other tasks as asked.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:
- Extensive knowledge of computational social science and social network analysis;
- Extensive knowledge and expertise in social media mining;
- Research experience with examining cyber campaigns run on social media;
- Research experience with examining multimedia-rich social media;
- Experience with transitioning research into usable tools;
- Computer programming skills and data management skills;
- Ability to interact with people of diverse ethnic backgrounds;
- Communication skills, writing skills, and public speaking; and
- Effective organizational skills.
Salary Information:
$48,000
Required Documents to Apply:
Resume
Recruitment Contact Information:
Dr. Nitin Agarwal (nxagarwal@ualr.edu)
Maulden-Energy Chair and Donaghey Distinguished Professor
Director, COSMOS Research Center
