Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

In Spring 2022, I was honored with the opportunity of being a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Imaging at Harvard . This center is a part of Harvard's  Faculty of Arts & Sciences . It is located in the Northwest Building  of Harvard, which is a multi-disciplinary research facility designed to enhance collaboration between neuroscience, bioengineering, computational analysis, and other disciplines. This center is spread across two floors in the Northwest Building, with an office suite on the ground floor, an imaging laboratory on the B4 floor, and also open spaces, optics rooms, environmentally-controlled rooms, and support spaces. Since its inception, this center is/was home to several labs including the  Babcock Lab , the  Seeber Lab , the  Cohen Lab , and the  Wadduwage Lab . Northwest Building, Harvard University At this center, I worked under  Dr. Dushan Wadduwage  of the  Wadduwage Lab for Differentiable Microscopy (∂µ) . His lab works on novel computational micr

Since processing speech with background noise requires appropriate parsing of the distorted auditory signal, individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may have difficulty processing speech with background noise due to reduced inhibitory control and working memory capacity. We conducted a study (Jayawardena et al.) by utilizing Audiovisual speech-in-noise (SIN) performance and eye-tracking measures of young adults with ADHD compared to age-matched controls for ADHD evaluation. In this study, there was five ADHD participants and six non-ADHD participants. We utilized eye tracking data recorded using a Tobii Pro X2-60 computer screen-based eye tracker. Each participant was told to watch a computer screen where a female speaks sentences out loud as levels of background noise varies and asked to repeat the sentences exactly as they heard them. The task consisted of varying six levels of background noise: 0 to 25 dB. Each participant was presented with nine sentences

As researchers, we often write code that others (including ourselves) might reuse in the future. Especially during early stages of research (i.e., the exploration phase), we hack bits and pieces of code together to test out different hypotheses. Upon discovering few hypotheses that work, our focus shifts towards rigorous testing, academic writing, and publication. So when should we pay attention to the reusability of research assets (i.e., data and code)? Ideally, as early as possible; yet this is easier said than done. For instance, at the exploration phase, it's often impractical to allocate time towards keeping research assets reusable. After all, it's uncertain whether the hypotheses would even work. In every phase that follows, we get consumed with testing, academic writing, and publication. For this reason, our concern on reusability becomes more of an afterthought. Given the cumulative nature of research, the implication of having non-reusable research assets on

This year's International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Web Archiving Conference (WAC) ( #IIPCWAC22 ) took place online. All of the presentations were pre-recorded and the live conference sessions were a Q&A format with the presenters. The pre-recorded videos and the session recordings will be publicly available at a later date and I will update this blog post with the links when they're available.  How can we make Web Archives and their data available to researchers? This was the main question that presenters were answering at this year's conference. Many presentations addressed lowering the barrier to Web archives to allow those outside of the Web archiving community, especially researchers, to access and leverage the holdings of the archives. Sawood Alam ( @ibnesayeed ) of the Internet Archive summed it up in the tweet below:   RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH!!! That's the most popular term/keyword of the #iipcWAC22 #WhyWebArchiving , which makes me s

As researchers, we acquire new developments in our fields through reading scientific literature. Even though we assume the reading and cognitive behaviors to be stochastic, recent studies reveal otherwise. Over the recent periods, we ( NirdsLab , WS-DL ) have been studying these patterns of researchers using eye-tracking and published a series of studies highlighting our findings. This blog will summarize our studies, highlighting our discoveries, realizations, and future directions.   For the discussion, we consider three peer-reviewed poster publications. Analyzing the Effect of Reading Patterns using Eye Tracking Measures ( DOI , JCDL 2020 , Best Poster ) Analyzing Unconstrained Reading Patterns of Digital Documents Using Eye Tracking ( DOI , JCDL 2021 , Best Poster ) Multidisciplinary Reading Patterns of Digital Documents ( DOI , ETRA 2022 , In Press) We will briefly review each publication, highlighting key features, novelties, and limitations. Then we identify potential resear