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2020-01-20: 366 dots in 2020 - top news stories of 2020

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Fig. 1 (Click image to expand) 366 dots in 2020 - Top news stories for 366 days in 2020. Each dot represents the average degree of the Giant Connected Component (GCC) with the largest average degree across all the 144 story graphs for a given day. The x-axis represents time, the y-axis represents the average degree of the GCC. The annotations (and legend) represented by colored dots were assigned semi-automatically . I join the chorus to say 2020 was a year like no other, and shaped by three historic events: the Coronavirus pandemic , the protests surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, and the US Presidential elections . According to StoryGraph , in 2018, the top news story was the Kavanaugh hearings . In 2019, it was the Mueller Report . Similar to 2018 and 2019 , we analyzed all news stories collected by StoryGraph at 10-minute intervals every day in 2020, to identify the top news stories of 2020. Recall how we identify top news stories , explained briefly in 365 dots in 201
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2021-01-20: Between the Election Day and the suspension of @realDonaldTrump, @joebiden has gained nine times more Twitter followers than @realDonaldTrump

By Nauman Siddique -
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Figure 1: Daily Twitter follower growth rate for  @joebiden  and  @realDonaldTrump On January 6, 2021, the US Congress certified Joe Biden as the 46th US President .  On January 8, 2021, Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump’s @realDonaldTrump account , fallout from his tweets regarding the riots at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the aftermath of the events since Election Day up until the permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump , we compared the follower growth of the personal Twitter accounts of  the 45th US President Donald Trump ( @realDonaldTrump ) and the 46th US President Joe Biden ( @joebiden ) between 2020-11-03 and 2021-01-12.  We have also provided the historical Twitter follower count information for @joebiden and @realDonaldTrump  used for this analysis.  Although  @joebiden  gained approximately nine times the Twitter followers as  @realDonaldTrump  between 2020-11-03 and 2021-01-12,  @realDonaldTrump  had approximately 3.7 times the Twitter followers of  @j
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2021-01-19: Summary of "Latent Feature Vulnerability Rankings of CVSS Vectors"

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Figure 1: CVSS Score Metrics. (Source: Balbix ) The Common Vulnerability Scoring System ( CVSS ) is an open framework for communicating the characteristics and severity of software vulnerabilities. These severity scores, ranging from 0 (low) to 10 (high),  have been directly used to prioritize vulnerability mitigation strategies . However, CVSS scores are not strongly linked to known  cybersecurity exploits  and analysts can be overwhelmed by the volume of vulnerabilities that have similar high scores. This simple ranking approach could be improved if more detailed information on vulnerabilities and exploits were available. In their paper " Latent feature vulnerability ranking of CVSS vectors ", Ross et al. seek to improve upon the CVSS score ranking by exploring the latent feature space described by a Jaccard similarity metric . Their goal is to provide a data-driven and alternative ranking approach using features in the CVSS base and temporal metric groups, Figure 1, enum
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2021-01-15: Six WS-DL classes Offered for Spring 2021

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https://xkcd.com/1264/ Six courses from the Web Science and Digital Libraries ( WS-DL ) Group will be offered in Spring 2021.  Because of Covid-19 , most of these classes will either be completely on-line or offered in a hybrid on-line / f2f option.  Check with the instructor to verify how the class will be conducted. CS 418/518 Web Programming , Dr. Jian Wu , Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:30-2:45. Topics : LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), MVC (Model-View-Control), Search Engines, GitHub.   CS 432/532 Web Science , Dr. Michele C. Weigle , asynchronous.  Topics : Python, R, D3, ML, and IR.   CS 480/580 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence , Dr. Vikas Ashok , Tuesdays & Thursdays, 3:00-4:15.   Topics : problem representation, problem-solving methods, search, pattern recognition, natural language processing, vision processing, machine learning, and expert systems. CS 495/595 Web Security , Dr. Michael L. Nelson , online Thursdays, 4:20-7:00.  Topics : HTTP, Cross-Site Request
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2021-01-14: Review of WS-DL's 2020

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Is there a more definitive 2020 academic image than a Zoom window? Despite the challenges of Covid-19's impact on education , the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group had a successful year, doing the best we could under the circumstances.  Most importantly, we graduated three Ph.D. students and one M.S. student, and added to our ranks five incoming graduate students and one instructor.   Students and Faculty We were fortunate enough to graduate three Ph.D. students this year.  Unfortunately, because of Covid all three defenses were over Zoom and we were unable to have our normal post-defense celebratory feast.   Mohamed Aturban defended his dissertation on 2020-07-23 .  Shortly after his defense, he was on the road to Columbia, Missouri where he joined the faculty at Columbia College as an assistant professor of computer science .  Alexander Nwala defended his dissertation on 2020-07-28 (it was a busy week for us!).  A few months later he headed north t
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