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Showing posts from September, 2020

2020-08-05: Trip report to WOSP: the 8th Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications

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  The I nternational Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications (WOSP) started in 2012. The main theme is to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and text mining tools to aid knowledge creation and improve the process by which the research is done. This year, due to the unprecedented pandemic by COVID-19, the entire workshop is moved online on August 5th, right after JCDL 2020. The workshop this year was organized by CORE , The Open University , UK, in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) , Tennessee, US. Keynotes Kuansan Wang (MSR Outreach Academic Services). Kuansan's presentation titled " Mitigating document collection biases with citations: A case study on CORD-19 ". Kuansan's presentation addressed a very important problem: document collection bias when conducting statistical analysis on distribution over subject fields, journal importance, and author networks. By comparing the properties of corpora selected by their algorithms, they had two

2020-09-28: A PhD is a very long tunnel with a light at the end

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My PhD defense committee: From the top left, Dr. M. Nelson (my co-advisor), Dr. M. Weigle (my advisor), Dr. M. Abdous, Dr. S. Jayarathna, Dr. J. Wu, and M. Aturban (myself).   This year has been tragic and depressing for most of us because of the pandemic, but it has not been that bad for me. I get the fruit of my hard work of almost eight years toward my PhD. I became a doctor and landed a job I love. My academic journey in the USA started around 12 years ago, where I first attended an intensive English program at Portland State University in Portland , Oregon, in 2008. About eight months later, in 2009, I moved to Las Cruces , New Mexico, where I completed my master's degree at New Mexico State University. In August 2012, I got accepted to the ODU 's PhD program. On July 23rd, I successfully (and virtually) defended my PhD dissertation entitled " A Framework for Verifying the Fixity of Archived Web Resources " ( presentation slides ). I never thought that immedia

2020-09-28: My report card to my mother

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On July 28, 2020, I defended my PhD dissertation --- Bootstrapping Web Archive Collections From Micro-Collections in Social Media --- a culmination of an 12-year journey that began when I arrived the US from Nigeria in 2007. I remain  grateful to God and many  who made this possible beginning with my father Alexander E. Nwala, my mother, Comfort C. Nwala whose vision I have realized, and my supervisors, Dr. Michael Nelson and Dr. Michele Weigle for guiding me through every paved and dirt road along my journey. I am very excited to join the Observatory on Social Media  (OSoMe) and Networks & agents Network (NaN) research group at Indiana University as a post-doc, under the supervision of Dr. Filippo Menczer . My research would focus on (mis/dis)information diffusion and the detection and countering of online manipulation. Summarizing the trajectory of my PhD research over the past six years is not an easy task. This blog post is an attempt.  2014 -- 2017: Twitter Bots, SERPs, Loca

2020-09-29: James Ecker (Computer Science PhD Student)

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Hello  WSDL Blog  readers! My name is  James (Jim/Jimmy) Ecker  and I joined the  Web Science and Digital Libraries  (WS-DL) research group  at  Old Domin ion Un iversity  as a Ph.D student in Fall 2019. I decided to pursue a Ph.D to primarily refine my skills in research, academic writing, and presenting/communicating my work . I am being advised by  Michael Nelson .  In my time at ODU, I have taken  CS891 - Emerging Technologies , where we developed our academic presentation skills with respect to presenting research on various emerging technologies,  CS800 - Research Methods , where we further developed academic presentation and writing skills, and am currently taking  CS895 - Web Archiving Forensics , where we are developing more applied research skills to establish whether information being shared on the internet is authentic. I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from  Florida Southern College  (FSC) in my hometown of  Lakeland, Florida . There, I established the  Fl

2020-09-27: Xin Wei (Computer Science PhD student)

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This is Xin Wei. I started working with Dr. Wu in the summer of 2020. I received bachelor's degree in Economics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. I also got a Master's degree from Stony Brook University . I am pursuing the Ph.D. degree at the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University . I transferred from Economics to Computer Science since CS can address more realistic problems compared with Economics. Before joining the  Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Lab , I have published several papers in the field of federated learning, incentivizing mechanism design, and sharing economy. I have published papers in IJCAI , IPDPS , and ICDCS .  These papers study the computation bottleneck problem in federated learning, the incentivizing mechanism considering heterogeneous difficulty levels in sharing economy, and the ideal location of parkings of sharing E-scooters. My research interests mainly lie in machine learning, big data, and NLP. After joining W

2020-09-17: IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science (IRI) 2020 Trip Report

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The 21st International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science (IRI 2020) was held virtually (due to the COVID-19 pandemic ) instead of Las Vegas as originally planned. IRI 2020 was hosted by the University of Cincinnati, USA , between August 11 - 13, 2020. This conference explores three major tracks: (1) information reuse, (2) information integration, and (3) reusable systems. This conference serves as a forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to present, discuss, and exchange ideas that address real-world problems with real-world solutions. Both theoretical and applied papers are included in IRI 2020. Similar to last year's conference ( IRI 2019 ), IRI 2020 program included paper sessions, workshops, panels and keynote speeches. Most of them were held in parallel sessions. Day 1 Welcome Following Stuart Rubin 's welcome note, Chengcui Zhang from University of Alabama at

2020-09-14: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME) 2020 Report

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The 2020 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME 2020) , hosted by the University of Minnesota , was held virtually 25-28 August 2020.  The first two days were dedicated to tutorials, workshops and the doctoral consortium.  The main conference was held during the last two days. The conference focused on significant theoretical, methodological, and applied results related to the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine.  Although it was held virtually, discussion boards attached to each presentation permitted interactions and networking opportunities with authors. Day 1 Tutorials Three tutorials were offered on the first day of the conference:   Methods and Applications of Natural Language Processing in Medicine Large Scale Ensembled NLP Systems with Docker and Kubernetes The Overview Effect: Clinical Medicine and Healthcare Concepts for the Data Scientist. The first tutorial was held in the morning and the other two were held simultaneously