Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  The  24th IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science (IRI 2023) took place at the  University of Washington, Bothell campus  between August 4 - 6, 2023. We ( Yasasi and Bathsheba ) attended the IRI 2023 conference in person and virtually to present our research work. The IRI conference provides a platform for scholars and professionals from academia, industry, and government to come together to showcase, deliberate, and share ideas exploring three major tracks: information reuse, information integration, and reusable systems. This year, the full research paper acceptance rate of IRI was 29%. Researchers from 18 countries and 5 continents (North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia) submitted their work to IRI 2023 research and poster tracks. Conference Venue - University of Washington, Bothell Campus Day 1 Keynote 1: Dr. Cissy Ma Day 1 of the conference started with the keynote by Dr. Cissy Ma , a research engineer at the Water Infra

  Figure 1: Using audit mode to replay mementos of https://oduwsdl.github.io/ from the Wayback Machine and archive.today While working on the Game Walkthroughs and Web Archiving project , we created web archiving livestreams where viewers would be able to watch two web crawlers archive a set of seed URIs and watch the replay of the archived web pages. We recently created a new mode that can audit web archives so that we can view archived web pages, or mementos , from different web archives at the same time. Viewing two mementos from different web archives is useful when the content on the original web page could vary based on personalization, location, or was different each time the web page was loaded. Audit mode will allow viewers to watch an audit of two web archives for the same URI-R. (A URI-R identifies the live web version of a web resource.) In audit mode, we show a replay of all of the unique mementos associated with a given URI-R for two web archives. Being able to view the

  Figure 1: Example of AccessBolt with File Explorer application. (Figure 1 from Utku et al.) Introduction User interface (UI) automation is the process of programmatically controlling and testing the UI of applications. In our last blog on UI automation, we talk about the ideas of using it and walkthrough of these interesting tools using the Python programming language. The main purposes of UI automation are to simulate user interactions for testing, increase test coverage, and reduce repetitive manual testing. In this blog, we are going to talk about a recently published paper named “ Taming User-Interface Heterogeneity with Uniform Overlays for Blind Users, ” published at the UMAP 2022 conference, where Utku et al. explored how to improve the accessibility of desktop application interfaces for blind individuals who rely on screen readers . The paper introduces a novel system called AccessBolt that aims to make interacting with desktop software easier and more efficient using UI

  Introduction There are so many applications for speech-to-text capabilities. Online meeting tools like Microsoft Teams use speech-to-text capabilities to transcribe meetings. Transcriptions of even live meetings may be performed to automate note taking . Video streaming websites and applications transcribe audio to support closed captioning (CC). Music files are transcribed to provide lyrics to support your favorite karaoke night. Transcribing podcasts, audiograms, and other video and audio files posted to social media may also be performed in the process of web scraping.  There are a lot of Python libraries available for individuals wishing to incorporate speech-to-text capabilities in their own applications and research.  Whisper , developed by OpenAI, is one such library that can not only perform transcriptions, but translations into multiple languages as well. Other major companies like Google and IBM have released their own libraries that also provide these capabilities. One adv