2016-09-27: Introducing Web Archiving in the Summer Workshop

For the last few years the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University invites a group of undergrad students from India and hosts them in the summer. They work closely with a research group on some relevant projects. Additionally, researchers from different research groups in the departments present their work to the guest students twice a week and introduce various different projects that they are working on. The goal of this practice is to allow them to collaborate with graduate students of the department and to encourage them for research studies. The invited students also act as ambassadors to share their experience with their colleagues and spread the word out when they go back to India.

This year a group of 16 students from Acharya Institute of Technology and B.N.M. Institute of Technology visited Old Dominion University, they were hosted under the supervision of Ajay Gupta. They worked in the areas of Sensor Networks and Mobil Application Development. They researched ways to integrate mobile devices with low-cost sensors to solve problems in health care-related areas and vehicular networks.

I (Sawood Alam) was selected to represent our Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group this year on July 28. Mat and Hany represented the group in the past. I happened to be the last presenter before they return back to India, by the time they were overloaded with scholarly information. Additionally, the students were not primarily from the Web science or digital libraries background. So, I decided to keep my talk semi-formal and engaging rather than purely scientific. The slides were inspired from my last year's talk in Germany on "Web Archiving: A Brief Introduction".

Introducing Web Archiving and WSDL Research Group by Sawood Alam

I began with my presentation slides entitled, "Introducing Web Archiving and WSDL Research Group". I briefly introduced myself with the help of my academic footprint and the lexical signature. I described the agenda of the talk and established the motivation for Web archiving. From there, I followed the talk agenda as laid out before, covering topics like issues and challenges in Web archiving, existing tools, services, and research efforts, my own research work about Web archive profiling, and some open research topics in the field of Web archiving. Then I introduced the WSDL research Group along with all the fun things we do in the lab. Being an Indian, I was able to pull in some cultural references from India to keep the audience engaged and entertained while still being on the agenda of the talk.

I heard encouraging words from Ajay Gupta, Ariel Sturtevant, and some of the invited students after my talk as they acknowledged it being one of the most engaging talks during the entire summer workshop. I would like to thank all who were involved in organizing this summer workshop and gave me the opportunity to introduce my field of interest and the WSDL research group.

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Sawood Alam