2014-07-08: Presenting WS-DL Research to PES University Undergrads

On July 7th and 8th, 2014, Hany SalahEldeen and I (Mat Kelly) were given the opportunity to present our PhD research to visiting undergraduate seniors from a leading university in Bangalore, India (PES University). About thirty students were in attendance at each session and indicated their interest in the topics through a large quantity of relevant questions.

Dr. Weigle (@weiglemc)

Prior to ODU CS students' presentations, Dr. Michele C. Weigle (@weiglemc) gave the students an overview presentation of some of WS-DL's research topics with her presentation Bits of Research.

In her presentation she covered both our lab's foundational work, recent work, some outstanding research questions, as well as some potential projects to entice interested students to work with our research group.

Bits of Research from Michele Weigle

Mat (@machawk1), your author

Between Hany and me, I (Mat Kelly) presented a fairly high level yet technical overview titled Browser-Based Digital Preservation, which highlighted my recent work in creating WARCreate, a Google Chrome extension that allows web pages to be preserved from the browser.

Though not merely a demo of the tool (as was given at Digital Preservation and JCDL 2012), I initially gave a primer on the dynamics of the web, HTTP, the state of web archiving, some issues relating to personal web archiving versus institutional web archiving, then finally, the problems that WARCreate addresses. I also covered some other related topics and browser-based preservation dynamics, which can be seen in the slides included in this post.

Browser-Based Digital Preservation from Mat Kelly

Hany (@hanysalaheldeen)

Hany (@hanysalaheldeen) presented the next day after my presentation, giving a general overview of his academic career and research topics. His presentation Zen and the Art of Data Mining covered the wide range of topics including (but not limited to) temporal user intention, the Egyptian Revolution, and his experience as an ODU WS-DL PhD student (to, again, entice the students).

Zen & the art of data mining from Hany SalahEldeen

The opportunity for Hany and me to present what we work on day-to-day to bright-eyed undergraduate students was unique, as their interest is both within our research area (computer science) yet still have doors open on what research path to take as potential graduate students.

We hope that the presentations and questions we were able to answer were of some help in facilitating their decisions to pursue a graduate career at the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Lab at Old Dominion University.

— Mat Kelly