Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

My name is Lesley Frew. I am a Computer Science MS student at ODU being supervised by Dr. Michele Weigle . I work full time as a high school computer science teacher in Northern Virginia. I started taking online graduate computer science courses at ODU in order to become qualified to teach dual enrollment computer science. Dual enrollment teachers need a master’s degree with a minimum of 18 graduate credits in their content area. I have been able to participate in a variety of unique career opportunities at both the state and national levels. When the Virginia Department of Education developed the Computer Science Standards of Learning in 2017, I served on the teacher review committee. I have also written curriculum through Code Virginia  and scored exams as an AP Computer Science A Reader . My school’s computer science program is thriving, with 16 sections being offered this year. Before becoming a teacher eleven years ago, I graduated from the University of Virginia ’s BA/MT linke

The increasing ubiquity of gaze-aware technologies (commonly referred to as eye trackers)  have enabled assessing patterns in our complex visual interaction with the surrounding world. We can characterize these complex interactions through gaze and pupil signals and extract them through eye trackers. Recent technological advancements in computer vision, image processing, and deep learning have led to the development of eye-trackers with a wide range of utility from consumer to research applications. As a result, gaze-aware technologies have the capability of mass adoption.  Analysis of oculomotor events (left), analysis methods (center), and measures (right) With the increasing utility of eye-tracking measures in human-computer interaction and research, a practitioner needs an aggregate body of knowledge. Our study, Eye Movement and Pupil Measures: A Review , tries to address the requirement by reviewing a selection of relevant prior research studies. For this purpose, we first identif

Introduction: There is a significant amount of research papers and tools for Named-entity recognition (NER); however, only a small potion of it addresses Arabic text and even less tools for extracting named entities from documents written in Arabic. In August 2020, I proposed an approach for extracting named entities from Arabic text using a combination of tools, Google Translate and Stanford NERC , and produced comparable results to Arabic Linguistic Pipeline (ALP) . The implementation of my approach, GTS, is available on GitHub . In December 2020, I wrote a  blog post outlining tools and libraries for matching Arabic names written in English , which is important for Entity Linking, a subtask of Natural Language Processing (NLP). While discussing the importance of Entity linking is beyond the scope of this post, merging Arabic named entities written in English is the first step for Entity Linking when processing English documents. This is because discrepancies between spellings, of th

One of the research thrusts I'm currently pursuing is evaluating how much we can trust crowd sourced data provided by users in a large multi-user network with social components. As a first step I've been considering some popular user-data networks and current efforts in literature in order to gain an understanding of some of the general dynamics of such systems. As you'll see, these dynamics can be best described, from a very high level, as a dependency on the interactions between users or, in some cases, autonomous agents, and their behavior in the system. The ultimate goal is to consider the quality of data the users/agents provide as their "behavior." These networks need not necessarily be social networks but can include social-centric services such as Waze  (a navigation application that uses user provided data on current traffic conditions and locations), Glassdoor  (a job search and company information site that uses user provided data on salaries and benefi

https://xkcd.com/2385/   Profs. Michael L. Nelson , Michele C. Weigle , and Jian Wu have been awarded a $10,000 COVA CCI Academic Curriculum Development Grant ( RFP COVACCI-21-05 ) with their proposal "Web Science and Web Security".  The deliverables of this project will include preparing and packaging for use outside of ODU four existing Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group courses that involve Web Security. Recently, WS-DL’s research and course offerings have moved toward the intersection of the web and security. In the process of developing and delivering our courses, it has become clear that we needed to offer a 400/500 level course focused on web client security .  Given the central role that the web plays in our daily commerce, education, and entertainment, we should be doing a better job producing BS and MS students with expertise in securing web applications. While web security is a significant portion of cybersecurity, it is often overlooked

  https://xkcd.com/2537/ Seven courses from the Web Science and Digital Libraries ( WS-DL ) Group will be offered in Spring 2022.  Because of the continuing Covid-19 situation , the classes will be a mixture of on-line, f2f, and hybrid.  Be sure to check with the instructor and/or the class schedule to verify how the class will be conducted.  Also keep in mind that the f2f classes might go on-line during the semester.   CS 495/595 Web Security , Dr. Michael L. Nelson , Mondays, 7:10-9:50pm.  Topics : HTTP, Cross-Site Request Forgery, Same Origin Policy, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Fingerprinting, Denial-of-service, Phishing.    CS 620 Intro to Data Science & Analytics , Dr. Sampath Jayarathna , Web PLE. Fridays 4:45-5:35pm (recitation). Topics : Python, Pandas, NumPy, NoSQL, Data Wrangling, ML.   CS 625 Data Visualization , Dr. Faryaneh Poursardar , Tuesdays & Thursdays, 9:30-10:45am.  Topics : Tableau, R, Vega-Lite, Observable, Markdown, OpenRefine, data cleaning, visu

Last year I collected all the #WebArchiveWednesday tweets that the Web Science and Digital Libraries Group ( @WebSciDL ) tweeted in 2020 , so I decided to do it again this year.  @TroveAustralia started the hashtag in 2019, then it was later adopted by the IIPC for World Digital Preservation Day 2019 , and since then the IIPC has been the driving force behind #WebArchiveWednesday .  Below I provide an edited list of the #WebArchiveWednesday tweets from 2021 that were about our group, from our group, or retweeted by members of our group.  Many are announcing our own papers, software releases, trip reports, defenses, blog posts, and other contributions.  However, I've made an effort to highlight the work of others as well as provide topical commentary.  In a perfect world, many of my Twitter threads should be converted into blog posts , but finding time to do that has been difficult.  This list should be taken simply as a weekly selection of whatever caught our eye on or near m