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2022-07-01 - Using GDELT to Monitor Xenophobic Violence Towards Migrants and Refugees project funded by ODU Data Science Seed Funding Program

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We are grateful to have received one of four Data Science Seed Funding awards from ODU to begin an investigation into using worldwide news data from  GDELT  to monitor xenophobic violence towards migrants and refugees. This is joint work with Erika Frydenlund from VMASC and will support one PhD student for one year.  The goal of the Data Science Seed Funding program was to foster collaborations between on-campus ODU faculty and VMASC researchers in the area of data science. Michele C. Weigle and Erika Frydenlund, Data Science for Social Good: Mining and Visualizing Worldwide News to Monitor Xenophobic Violence Towards Migrants and Refugees, ODU Data Science Seed Funding, Jul 2022 - Jun 2023, $38,000. Monitoring the prevalence of xenophobic violence towards migrants and refugees is an important requirement for policymakers to provide support and resources to the areas most in need. Previous approaches have largely involved manual curation of news articles and data or have been f
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2022-06-27: Computation + Journalism 2022 Trip Report

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The 2022 Computation + Journalism (C+J) Symposium was held in-person at Columbia University and online, June 9-11 . The proceedings are now available with links to PDFs of the referred submissions. I virtually attended several of the sessions on Thursday and Friday, but unfortunately missed the Saturday sessions. A full hybrid session in motion… #cj2022 pic.twitter.com/WhPE7kL6x9 — Bahareh Heravi (@Bahareh360) June 10, 2022 After the success of the fully online C+J 2021, the organizers again used the ohyay.co platform for the online attendees and speakers. In general it worked great again. My only complaint is that the speakers' slides were sometimes too small because of the space given to speaker and panel video and other decorative elements (or maybe it was just too small to view on my laptop screen). Most of the sessions were parallel, so like last year , I had a little trouble deciding which sessions to attend; they all contained interesting work. I didn't ta
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2022-06-21: Hands-On Experience with CyberExL Program

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It was a great pleasure that my proposal was selected for CyberExL (CybersecurityGraduate Experiential Learning Program) in 2022. CyberExL, a COVA CCI graduate experiential learning program, is designed to provide graduate students with opportunities to gain vital experience and mentorship in various areas of cybersecurity by working directly with companies, faculty, researchers, and university administrators. In this program, both the placement proposals and student applications are reviewed by a committee of faculties from CCI member institutions. Then an awardee faculty or industry mentor and a selected graduate student work together on an innovative cybersecurity project. The program started on January 10, 2022 and ended on May 6, 2022. I highly encourage students to participate in the program. Keming Wu , who is pursuing a master’s degree in business analytics at William & Mary, worked on “ Crowdsourced Review Manipulation Attacks” to identify the fake reviews on the Am
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2022-06-21: My Visiting Fellowship at Harvard

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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
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2022-06-18: ADHD Prediction Through Analysis of Eye Movements With Graph Convolution Network

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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
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2022-06-17: StreamingHub - Building Reusable, Reproducible Workflows

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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
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2022-06-15: IIPC Web Archiving Conference (WAC) Trip Report

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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
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