2020-05-28: Richard Pates (Computer Science PhD Student)

     Welcome to my profile on Blogger! My name is Richard Pates and I joined the Web Sciences and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) research group in the Department of Computer Science (CS) at Old Dominion Univeristy (ODU) during the Summer of 2020 as a PhD Student in CS advised by Dr. Jian Wu as a member of the research team in the Lab for Applied Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Systems (LAMP-SYS) Group working on the Mining Electronic Theses and Dissertations (METD) Project. Upon earning the Masters of Science in Computer Science (MSCS) from ODU during the Fall of 2018 approval was granted to join the PhD program in CS during the Spring of 2019 jointly advised by Dr. Ravi Mukkamala and Dr. Cong Wong with an interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cybersecurity and Systems.

     This year the main goal in the PhD program for me will be to advance as a PhD Candidate during the Fall of 2020 (Current Academic Calendar) having made the Doctoral Dissertation Committee selection of the WS-DL research area committee led by Dr. Michael Nelson and complete the PhD Course Requirements. During the Summer of 2020 (Current Academic Calendar) my research goal will be to work with Dr. Jian Wu as a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) and a pre-established research collaboration relationship with Virginia Tech Computer Science to produce a diverse scholarly Big Data corpus consisting of 200,000 ETD's from U.S. Universities in different ranks and make them searchable within a database. The database will likely be ElasticSearch with Kibana installed or possibly ElasticSearch-PHP. The long term research goal (possible thesis topic) will be to work on building a deep learning model for ETD segmentation. During the Fall of 2020 my goal will to be work with Dr. Jian Wu as a GRA and Pass the Topics Course CS 895 Mining Scholarly Big Data becoming familiar with the book Mining of Massive Datasets recommended by Dr. Jian Wu.

     Working with the WS-DL group so far has been rewarding having met with other students (Muntabir Choudury and Himarsha Jayanetti) using the Zoom Meeting app and Google Hangout app in my ODU email during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Muntabir described how to get started with web crawling ETD's from Universities and shared a web crawling Python program on GitHub that uses BeautifulSoup. That enabled me to grow quickly understanding the basic concepts and making my own more elaborate python programs to crawl higher ranking Universities such as MIT Theses on DSpace. Himarsha helped me to get started with the WS-DL ODU Wiki. 

     Dr. Jian Wu has helped mentor by guiding my thinking more smartly while in the PhD Program at ODU and he really deserves the recent recognition of his abilities. Dr. Jian Wu helped me to make a connection with Virginia Tech (VT) team members Bipasha Banerjee, Palakh Jude, and Sampanna Kahu. Through this relationship, I was able to review some current course work on ElasticSearch (ES), ETD's, and Kibana that helped me grow in understanding ES for research with ETD's. Bill Ingram from VT was also introduced by Dr. Jian Wu and provided me a tutorial on making the Mueller Report searchable with ES and Kibana. I also met Dr. Edward Fox who introduced a recent Millions of historic newspaper images get the machine learning treatment at the Library of Congress. Dr. Jian Wu also shared his slides with me from his own CS 418/518 Web Programming course that helped me get started quickly with ES, Kibana, and PHP.

     After completing the PhD program, I would like to continue doing research work professionally as a Computer Research Scientist that may involve Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, Data Science, Software Engineering, and Systems. My work as a Computer Scientist Systems Administrator/Engineer/Programmer in the field of Cybersecurity, outside of college has proudly been full-time since earning the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from ODU in the Fall of 2013. Each of the four career promotions have led to more rewarding opportunities both financially and interesting in the nature of the work performed. So far, only a Bachelors's degree was required to enter each position and in each position, the more interesting complex projects are delegated to team leads. My role almost always ends up being a part of that effort doing all the work in a particular area in which I typically excel without supervision or very little initially (likely due to being an online learner that requires lots of self-motivation). My long term goal is to become a researcher that comes up with new ideas that benefit science and get worked on either by myself or teams.

     Thanks for taking the time to read my blog post to get to know more about me. Your time is appreciated! Please post any questions or comments.

          Best wishes,

          Richard Pates