Andrew Crooks

Crooks holds a PhD. In geography from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College London, a MSc in Geographical Information Science and a BSc (hons) in Geology and Physical Geography from the University of Edinburgh. He has published over 65 journal articles and 60 fully reviewed conference papers.

Crooks's research focuses on understanding the connections between people and places through the lens of computational social science. His main toolbox includes agent-based modelling (ABM), geographical information science (GIS) and social network analysis (SNA). As a computational social scientist.

By utilizing social media he has studied the role that bots have played on presidential elections and that of how people discuss health issues and vaccine stance. Through modeling and simulation, he has studied how online and offline interactions can lead to disease outbreaks or riots.  His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Related Publications:

Yin, F., Crooks, A.T. and Yin, L. (2022), Information Propagation on Cyber, Relational and Physical Spaces about Covid-19 Vaccine: Using Social Media and the Splatial Framework, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2022.101887 .

Shapiro, B. and Crooks, A.T. (2022) Drone Strikes and Radicalization: An Exploration Utilizing Agent-Based Modeling and Data Applied to Pakistan, Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory. Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-022-09364-1.

Chen, Q. and Crooks, A.T. (2022), Analyzing the Vaccination Debate in Social Media Data Pre- and Post-COVID-19 Pandemic, International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 110: 102783. Available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2022.102783

Yuan, X., Mahabir, R., Crooks, A.T. and Croitoru, A. (2021), Achieving Situational Awareness of Drug Cartels with Geolocated Social Media, GeoJournal. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-021-10433-2

Schuchard, R.J. and Crooks, A.T. (2021), Insights into Elections: An Ensemble Bot Detection Coverage Framework Applied to the 2018 U.S. Midterm Elections, PLoS ONE, 16(1): e0244309.  Available at  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244309.

Schuchard, R., Crooks, A.T., Croitoru, A. and Stefanidis, A. (2019) Bots Fired: Examining Social Bot Evidence in Online Mass Shooting Conversations, Palgrave Communications, 5: 158. Available at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0359-x.

Yuan, X., Schuchard, R. and Crooks, A.T. (2019), Examining Emergent Communities and Detecting Social Bots within the Polarized Online Vaccination Debate in Twitter, Social Media + Society. Available at https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119865465.

Schuchard, R., Crooks, A.T., Stefanidis, A. and Croitoru, A. (2019), Bot Stamina: Examining the Influence and Staying Power of Bots in Online Social Networks, Applied Network Science, 4: 55. Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-019-0164-x.

Visit the Department of Geography website for Crook's complete profile, including latest research and publications.