Dr. Nitin Agarwal

Dr. Nitin Agarwal is the Maulden-Enetrgy Endowed Chair and Distinguished professor of information science at University of Arkansas-Little Rock. He is an International Academy, Research and Industry Association (IARIA) Fellow. His research focuses on studying the role of socio-technical systems, especially social media in conducting cyber campaigns such as Saudi Women’s efforts to raise awareness regarding 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 NSF, ONR, ARO, AFRL, and DARPA, the research is grounded in the theoretical principles of cyber collective action, social identity formation, resource mobilization, and social movement spillover.  Dr. Agarwal has developed Blogtrackers tool to analyze blogs to help identify key information actors, opinion leaders, leading narratives during an (mis/dis)information campaign, and how those narratives spread via other forms of social media (viz., Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and others).  He is working with NATO’s strategic communications (STRATCOM) center of excellence, public affairs officers of various MoDs of the NATO member countries, information operations officers, and psychological operations officers to support their efforts to stem the tide of mis/disinformation and conduct training of social media analysis tools for them.

Dr. Agarwal obtained his Ph.D. from Arizona State University with outstanding dissertation recognition in 2009. 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. Visit http://ualr.edu/nxagarwal/ for more details.