Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

(note: Carbon Date 2.0 was released on 2014-11-14 ) In the course of our research we often needed to determine when a certain web resource was created. In numerous cases, this question is fairly straightforward to answer by examining the resource itself. Articles often have publishing datetime stamps, social media contributions have posting time, and others you can estimate the creation date from reading the resource itself. This process is simple upon manually examining the resource, but when the dataset of resources is large it is harder to automate. To solve this problem we conducted several experiments to determine when the resource was created automatically. When a resource is created it often gets indexed in the search engines, archived in the public archives, and shared in the social media thus leaving trails of existence. We trace those trails of existence and use the first appearance of the first trail as a close estimate of the creation date. The timeline below illustra...

On April 5-6, I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet and network with many successful senior women as well as graduate students from other universities in CRA-W Graduate Cohort , which was held in Boston, MA. Grad Cohort, which began in 2004, aims to increase the ranks of senior women in computing by building and mentoring nationwide communities of women through their graduate studies. Grad Cohort accepts women students in their first, second, or third year of graduate school in computer science and engineering. They provide sessions for each of the three years. Since I am now in my third year of my computer science Ph.D., I attended third year sessions, which I'm going to talk about in the rest of the blog post. The workshop included a mix of formal presentations and informal discussions. In the first day's afternoon, there was a Poster Session for participants to talk about their research. I presented a poster entitled " Access Patterns for Robots and Humans...