Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  Disinformation that spreads on the Web and social media isn't just a nuisance, it causes real harm. There is a consensus that a significant amount of false or misleading information is deliberately made to confuse, influence, harm, mobilize, or demobilize a target audience. The widespread use of social media has provided more channels for disseminating disinformation. Disinformation also exists in the form of “fake news”, consisting of deliberate misinformation. Unfortunately, due to the lack of understanding of the basic and/or the best available science, and the limited accessibility of credible information, a vast number of citizens are susceptible to disinformation. We are excited to receive 2022 National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduate Site (REU Site) award worth $$324,000 for three years for this research towards " Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Disinformation Detection and Analytics ."  Our REU Site ( http://reu.cs.odu

Most GitHub users are aware of *.github.io as a GitHub hosted website. But, before there was *.github.io, ( https://elescamilla.github.io ) there was *.github.com (https://elescamilla.github.com) that had the exact same functionality. What caused the change? On April 5, 2013, GitHub released a statement that they would be deprecating *.github.com for security reasons. In the post, they said that "all traffic will be redirected to the new *.github.io location indefinitely,  so you won't have to change any links". However, on January 29, 2021, they released an updated statement that they would stop redirecting *github.com to *.github.io starting April 15, 2021 to further address security concerns. They recommended that users "remove any external references to *.github.com". To encourage users to update any external links, they scheduled two " brown out " dates and notified users of the upcoming change. But... In most situations, it is difficult to modi

My name is Yasasi Abeysinghe . I am an international student from Sri Lanka. I joined Old Dominion University as a Ph.D. student in Spring 2022 under the supervision of Dr. Sampath Jayarathna . My current research project involves evaluating human eye (oculomotor plant) features for an objective measure of working memory capacity. My research interests include machine learning, data science, human-computer interaction, and eye-tracking. Ever since I stepped into the study of science in my early school days, I have been intrigued by the vastness of the field. My passion towards the field to explore and learn new things has carried me on a journey since then. In December 2018, I graduated with a B.Sc. Engineering (Hons) degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Moratuwa with first-class honors. In the final year of my undergraduate degree program, I conducted my research on “Generation of Review Aspect Hierarchy using Word Embedding and Clustering”, under the super

The 36th AAAI conference was held online between February 28 and March 1, 2022. I co-authored a demo paper titled " A synthetic prediction market for estimating confidence in published work " with my collaborators at Pennsylvania State University and Rutgers University. I also got a paper accepted by the 2nd Workshop on Advances, Resources, Tools, and Challenges of Scientific Document Understanding (SDU) , titled " Segmenting Technical Drawing Figures in US Patents ", with my collaborators at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).  In this blog post, I focus on briefing four papers presented in the SDU workshop held on March 1, 2022, including my paper. Most papers mentioned in this blog post are highly relevant to my research in the field of mining scholarly big data.  1. Segmenting Technical Drawing Figures in US Patents (Hoque et al., ODU & LANL) This is our paper. The goal is to segment compound figures that include multiple subfigures. The paper compared

Truly interdisciplinary research is hard. It’s even harder when the place you’re trying to research is impossible to reach, either due to conflict or regimes that are hostile to outside researchers. In that hard-to-reach environment, we’re not only trying to bridge epistemological and methodological divides to understand “ground truth,” we also can’t do all the types of data collection and analysis we might need. For instance, it is really difficult to send qualitative sociologists and anthropologists into the field to collect data during a conflict event.  So excited to start this dream project to advance #socialscience research with an international dream team! @jojpa @MichaelaHynie @weiglemc @phonedude_mln @katapalacio Department of Defense Awards $28.7M in Grants for the FY2021 Minerva Research Initiative https://t.co/kJEPS0wpjA — Erika Frydenlund (@ErikaFrydenlund) February 25, 2022 The Minerva Research Initiative has given researchers at Old Dominion University $1.6M

The Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving project has started this year and is funded by the IIPC . This project will focus on the synergy between web archiving, gaming, and video game live streaming platforms. One of the goals for this project is to apply gaming concepts to web archiving. For this blog post, I will focus on the integration of web archiving and the gaming concept of speedruns . For my initial example of an archiving speedrun, I gave Brozzler and Browsertrix Crawler a set of URLs to archive and I recorded the archiving session to see which crawler would finish the set first. The set consisted of 20 URLs that were selected from a dataset that I will use for future automated livestreams. I also created a livestream script that will run two crawlers beside each other while they are archiving a set of URLs. The first speedrun round is included below. During this speedrun Browsertrix was able to reach the halfway point ( 10 URLs archived ) faster than Brozzler. Brozzler

Eye Tracking with PupilLabs Core Tracker "Eyes Are Windows to the Soul” especially when machines can track your eyes! Eye tracking is a technology that can track where you are looking at and how your eyes react to the various stimulus around your environment. Eye tracking measures can glean extraordinary amount of information about your behavior and cognition. The eye movement data analytics is often computationally expensive, and most vendor software do not support automated real-time analysis of eye movements. If we can process these eye movements in real-time, we can infer quantifiable information about covert cognitive processes such as human attention and working memory. We are excited to receive 2021 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for this research towards “ Eye Tracking Streaming Analytics .”   The CAREER award is the NSF's most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and e