2024-04-15: Review of WS-DL's 2023
Most of the Web Science & Digital Libraries Research Group, 2023-04-13 |
Although Covid continued in 2023, things at ODU and the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) Research Group were mostly normal, or at least the new normal. Most classes, meetings, some conferences, and even defenses are now a hybrid of f2f and online. This year, we transitioned one faculty member, graduated two MS students and one BS student, advanced the status of six PhD students, and added five new PhD students.
Students and Faculty
We did not graduate any PhD students this year, but we did have two students defend their MS theses, and one student finish his BS and enter the MS program:
- Emily Escamilla defended her MS thesis on July 25, 2023 and then moved to Florida to take a job with MITRE in Orlando.
- Himarsha Jayanetti defended her MS thesis on April 13, 2023 and is still with us as a PhD student.
- Caleb Bradford finished his BS and entered the MS program.
We did not add any faculty, but Dr. Faryaneh Poursardar transitioned from being a lecturer in the CS department to a research assistant professor at VMASC during the summer of 2023. Although as a research professor she is no longer teaching, WS-DL has many collaborative projects with VMASC and we will continue to work with her there. We continued to expand our course portfolio, with eight classes offered in S23 and six in F23, including new classes in deep learning (Dr. Wu), computer vision (Dr. Ashok), and scientific writing (Dr. Jayarathna).
I'm excited to share that I successfully defended my MS thesis "Assessing the Prevalence and Archival Rate of URIs to Git Hosting Platforms in Scholarly Publications"! 🧵
— Emily Escamilla (@EmilyEscamilla_) August 9, 2023
Thank you to my committee: Drs. @phonedude_mln, @weiglemc, @fanchyna #WebArchiveWednesday @oducs @WebSciDL pic.twitter.com/XRaus1yofx
Thank you, @ODUSCI!
— Himarsha R. Jayanetti (@HimarshaJ) May 12, 2023
I am excited to continue my academic journey as a PhD student with the @WebSciDL group in @oducs. I look forward to furthering my research and contributing to the group's efforts 🙂 https://t.co/Tzlac5IOqE
Great to see Caleb @calebkbradford from our very first NSF REU cohort @oducsreu graduate from @oducs with a BS in Computer Science. Congratulations!!!! and Caleb is continuing his MS degree at the @WebSciDL group @odu. I was there as a Lead Marshal for the @ODUSCI commencement. pic.twitter.com/uPO1myDx7c
— Sampath Jayarathna (@OpenMaze) May 9, 2023
We're thrilled to introduce Dr. Faryaneh Poursardar as our new Research Assistant Professor. Her expertise spans social computing, web & data science, NLP & more. Now, she's focusing on identifying & countering deceptive info on online social platforms. Welcome, Dr. Poursardar! pic.twitter.com/rT6BZOdW3J
— VMASC ODU (@VMASC_ODU) August 7, 2023
We added 5 new PhD students:
- Brian Llinas Marimon (@bllin001) joined WS-DL in Spring 2023 and is working with Dr. Nelson.
- Kumushini Thennakoon (@KumushiniT) joined WS-DL in Fall 2023 and is working with Dr. Nelson.
- Rochana Obadage (@rochanaro) joined WS-DL in Fall 2023 and is working with Dr. Wu.
- Jhon G. Botello (@Jhon_gbm12) joined WS-DL in Fall 2023 and is working with Dr. Weigle.
- Akshay Kolgar Nayak (@AkshayKNayak7) joined WS-DL in Fall 2023 and is working with Dr. Ashok.
We also had six students advance in their status:
- Yasith Jayawardana's dissertation proposal "StreamingHub: A Framework to Build Real-Time Analytics Workflows for Scientific Research" was accepted on 2023-04-26.
- Mohan Krishna presented his candidacy proposal "Enabling Customization of Discussion Forums for Blind Users" on 2023-07-18.
- Javedul Ferdous presented his candidacy proposal "InSupport: Proxy Interface for Enabling Efficient Non-Visual Interaction with Web Data Records" on 2023-07-20.
- Kehinde (Kenny) Ajayi presented his candidacy proposal "A Study on Reproducibility and Replicability of Table Structure Recognition Methods" on 2023-09-25.
- Kritika Garg presented her candidacy proposal "Replaying Archived Twitter: When your bird is broken, will it bring you down?" on 2023-04-17
- Himarsha, as a result of defending her MS thesis, advanced her status to PhD candidate.
Yasith Jayawardana @yasithdev presenting his PhD dissertation proposal titled StreamingHub: A Framework to Build Real-Time Analytics Workflows for Scientific Research. @WebSciDL @NirdsLab @oducs pic.twitter.com/lBPx7qarhF
— Gavindya (@Gavindya2) April 26, 2023
.@mk344567 is now presenting his Ph.D. candidacy exam (Oral Component), "Enabling Customization of Discussion Forums for Blind Users."
— Md Javedul Ferdous (@jaf_ferdous) July 18, 2023
cc:/ @WebSciDL @accessodu @oducs @ODUSCI pic.twitter.com/CJkCLjZBm8
A phd student, @jaf_ferdous is currently presenting his Ph.D. candidacy exam (Oral Component). The title of his presentation is "InSupport: Proxy Interface for Enabling Efficient Non-Visual Interaction with Web Data Records."@WebSciDL @accessodu @odu_gradschool @oducs pic.twitter.com/z6Ckxrt0Qj
— Mohan Krishna Sunkara (@mk344567) July 20, 2023
Congratulations to Kehinde (Kenny) Ajayi, who passed his candidacy exam! His presentation title was "A Study on Reproducibility and Replicability of Table Structure Recognition Methods". The full paper is available at https://t.co/kcWsaxl4YF @WebSciDL @Ai4SciSci pic.twitter.com/gHJE85GeAI
— Jian Wu (@fanchyna) September 25, 2023
Time to make things @wsdl official :) advancing on the@WebSciDL PhD Crush board @yasithdev @Gavindya2 on to ABD status!!! @NirdsLab @oducs pic.twitter.com/mNTqiq4KNV
— Sampath Jayarathna (@OpenMaze) April 28, 2023
Publications and Presentations
We've given up trying to manually compile a list of publications from our group, but our best estimate for 2023 is a total of 58 publications, including: 9 journal articles, 33 conference/workshop publications, and 16 technical reports or other contributions. I've included an expandable/collapsable gist below that is our merged 2023 publications list according to Scholar Groups.
In 2023, conferences were still a mix of f2f and virtual, with the former slowly returning to the norm. Below is a partial list of trip reports for the events where we presented our work:
- Bhanuka, Mohan, Dr. Ashok , and Dr. Jayarathna attended ACM CHIIR 2023 in Austin TX.
- Emily attended the Web Archiving Conference (WAC) 2023 in the Netherlands, and Kritika attended the earlier, on-line session for WAC.
- Yasasi (in-person) and Gavindya (remotely) attended ETRA 2023 in Germany.
- Much of the entire WS-DL group went to JCDL 2023 in Santa Fe, New Mexico:
- Muntabir wrote about the JCDL Doctoral Consortium.
- Lesley wrote about the ARK tutorial.
- Kritika wrote about the Web Archiving and Digital Libraries (WADL) workshop.
- Xin wrote about the Extraction and Evaluation of Knowledge Entities from Scientific Documents (EEKE2023) workshop.
- Lesley also took the lead in compiling the trip report for the overall JCDL conference.
- Lesley's "Making Changes in Webpages Discoverable" won best student paper.
- Kenny attended ICADR 2023 in San Jose, CA.
- Yasasi (in-person) and Bathsheba Farrow (remotely) attended IEEE IRI 2023 in Bothell, WA.
- Himarsha, Brian Llinas, and Tarannum Zaki attended the local Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Student Capstone Conference (MSVSCC 2023).
- Mohan attended both ACM IUI 2023 in Australia and ACM SIGCHI 2023 in the UK.
- Brian, Himarsha, and Jhon attended SBP-BRiMS 2023 in Pittsburgh, PA.
- Undergraduate Kayla Pineda traveled to the Augmented Humans 2023 conference in the UK.
- Drs. Poursardar, Ashok, and Wu, along with Dominik Soos, attended and presented at the CCI Symposium in Richmond.
WS-DL students, alumni, and faculty at JCDL 2023 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. |
Research Presentations and Outreach
In addition to the conferences and workshops listed above where we presented papers, we also had an array of presentations and outreach.
This year, our main summer event was hosting eight students for the second year of our NSF Disinformation Detection and Analytics Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program. The final presentations highlight the exciting progress we made last year and we look forward to third cohort this summer.
Dr. Jayarathna organized our fourth annual "Trick or Research" event, which was both f2f and virtual. Some of our other outreach events include:
- Dr. Ashok presented at the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Artificial Intelligence and Accessibility Research Symposium in January.
- Dr. Ashok presented "Next-Generation Assistive Technologies Using AI" at a CS Department colloquium in January.
- In February, Dr. Jayarathna presented at an ODU Seminar "Impact of AI on Higher Education", hosted at the Perry Library.
- WS-DL was well-represented at the "How are Misinformation and Disinformation Related to You? -- Perspectives from Researchers and Educators" seminar, also hosted at Perry Library in February. Drs. Wu, Jayarathna, Weigle, Ashok, and Poursardar presented. This seminar received coverage from WTKR.
- In March, Dr. Jayarathna was part of the site visit at Oscar Smith Middle School as part of "Lab School" proposal team.
- As part of "Global Accessibility Awareness Day", Dr. Ashok, Mohan, and Satwik gave presentations about "Assistive Technologies for People with Visual Impairments", also hosted at Perry Library.
- We held our third annual WS-DL Research Expo in May, featuring status reports from one graduate student per faculty member.
- Like last year, Dr. Poursardar again presented at the College of Sciences Data Science Bootcamp.
- Dr. Jayarathna and various members of WS-DL hosted members of the Governor's STEM Academy in March.
- Dr. Wu hosted Bill Ingram (Va Tech) in March, where he presented "Building A Large Collection of Multi-domain Electronic Theses and Dissertations".
- We hosted Michael Herzog (University of Magdeburg-Stendal, Germany) in April, where he presented "Using Design Science Research to Develop Innovative Educational Technology".
- Dr. Weigle traveled to the Lucy Family Institute at Notre Dame to present "Using Web Archives to Document Social Movements and Disinformation - Practice, Ethics, and Challenges".
- Dr. Faryaneh held a workshop for the NASA@MyLibrary project.
- Kayla also presented at the VSGC Student Research Conference.
- Dr. Jayarathna represented us at the REU Site PI meeting in April.
- Johnovon Richard, one of the 2023 REU cohort undergraduate student presented "Leveraging Data Analysis and Machine Learning to Authenticate Yelp Reviews through User Metadata Patterns" with Drs. Poursardar and Jayarathna at the ACM MobiHoc 2023 REUNS Workshop in DC.
- Dr. Poursardar and her two students, Saumya Dabhi and Lokesh Reddy Santoreni, presented "Revealing the Fake: Detecting Fake Reviews on Yelp Crowdsourced Platform” at COVA CCI CyberCon 2023, which took place at ODU.
.@OpenMaze introducing @maherzog for his @oducs colloquium, and then later at @OConnorBrewing with @WebSciDL and friends. https://t.co/8bPsx4lSU8 pic.twitter.com/gqXmLirWSa
— Michael L. Nelson (@phonedude_mln) April 6, 2023
Software, Data Sets, Services
Our scholarly contributions are not limited to conventional publications or presentations: we also advance the state of the art through releasing software, data sets, and proof-of-concept services & demos. Some of the software, data sets, and services that we either initially released or made significant updates to in 2023 include:
- Rachel Zheng's REU code and data set for analyzing karchived Instagram pages.
- Emily released the code to support the research into how well repositories are archived (e.g., TPDL 2022, ICADL 2023).
- Yasith's development on StreamingHub continues in anticipation of a 2024 PhD defense.
- Yash Prakash released the data set and code from their IUI 2023 paper.
- Kenny released the code and data for their ICDAR 2023 paper.
Awards and Recognition
Many members of our group received awards and other forms of recognition:
- Dr. Nelson was interviewed and/or quoted in the popular media several times:
- New Scientist, talking about Zero Knowledge Proofs (paywalled original).
- The Grid, talking about the removal of freee access to the Twitter API.
- Atlantico, talking about the demise of the French blogging site Skyblog.
- Le Monde, talking about Skyblog and disappearing web preservation.
- Observer, talking about WordPress's 100 Year Plan
- Bhanuka and Xin both won the 2023 Irwin B. Levinstein scholarship.
- Kayla Pineda won a travel award to attend the Augment Humans 2023 conference, as well as "Provost's Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher".
- Muntabir received a travel grant for JCDL 2023, as did Himarsha as well.
- Yasasi Abey won the Gary Marsden Travel Award to attend the ETRA 2023 conference.
- Dr. Jayarathna, Gavindya, Yasith, and Bhanuka won the 2022 Outstanding Article award -- Editor's Pick for his survey paper "Eye Movement and Pupil Measures: A Review".
- David Calano's blog post "Survey of Data Interfaces and Archived Data" was highlighted by Archive-It in their newsletter, while another blog post, "In A Terminal Far, Far Away...", was in hrbrmstr's newsletter.
- WS-DL alumnus Dr. Justin Brunelle was recognized by the ODU Alumni Association in their annual "40 under 40" awards program.
- Tarannum won the best presentation award and Himarsha won best overall paper at the Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Student Capstone Conference (MSVSCC 2023).
- Dr. Jayarathna won ODU College of Sciences "Distinguished Early Career Research" award, as well as the "2023 Provost’s Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor".
- Javedul received the ACM CHI PLAY "Recognition for Service Award".
- Dr. Weigle was named a 2023 Diversity Champion at ODU.
I'm super honored and excited to have been nominated by my spouse and selected for @ODUAlumni's 40 under 40 class of 2023! Success is a team sport and I couldn't have gotten here without all of my @WebSciDL and @MITREcorp colleagues! https://t.co/gq40C2XB3Y
— Justin F Brunelle (@justinfbrunelle) May 16, 2023
Thank you @odu President @BrianOHemphill for the great night at the Faculty and Administrators Awards and Service Dinner, April 10, 2023. With my +1 Pahan Jayarathna at the award dinner :) @WebSciDL @ODUSCI @oducs https://t.co/WphbLPvNHv pic.twitter.com/HTR269JaRN
— Sampath Jayarathna (@OpenMaze) April 11, 2023
Funding
After receiving about $6M in total funding over the last three years, this year was mostly quiet with respect to external funding. We did receive $27k from three external awards and one internal award.- Drs. Wu and Jayarathna, received $15k for supporting student travel to the 2023 JCDL Doctoral Consortium.
- Drs. Poursardar and Weigle received $3000 from the ODU College of Sciences for “Incorporating AI Technologies into Data Science Courses in the Department of Computer Science”.
- Dr. Jayarathna was the PI, with Co-PIs Dr. Yusuf (Public Service), Dr. Allen (Geography), and Dr. Karunarathna (Academic Advising) for $7825 from the Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC), Innovative Projects Grant for “CARE: Coastal Adaptation and Resilience Education”.
- Dr. Karunarathna (PI) and Dr. Jayarathna (Co-PI) received $1000 from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for “2023 Citizen Water Quality Monitoring Grant Program”.
Looking Ahead to 2024
Things mostly returned to normal in 2023, but periodic rescheduling of meetings and other events due to Covid is perhaps our new normal. Regardless, 2023 was a strong year for us: we graduated one BS and two MS students and added five PhD students. One of our faculty members, Dr. Faryaneh Poursardar, transitioned from lecturer to research assistant professor at VMASC. We continued to publish in prestigious venues, even if our funding rate cooled down after a red hot 2022 ($4M). WS-DL continues to grow and thrive, and I am proud of all the members and alumni and their progress in 2023.
If you would like to join WS-DL, please get in touch. To get a feel for our recent activities, please review our previous WS-DL annual summaries (2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013) and be sure to follow us at @WebSciDL to keep up to date with publications, software releases, trip reports and other activities. We especially would like to thank all those who have publicly complimented some aspect of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group: our code, services, papers, or students and faculty. We really appreciate the feedback, some of which we include below.
-- Michael
Very cool to see some of early findings and also tooling from the "lifetime of a web page" research being shared out in the world.#iipcWAC23 #iipc20Years #WebArchiveWednesday https://t.co/mEYFbL67Si
— 🦕 @dietrich@mastodon.social / 🦋@burrito.space (@dietrich) May 3, 2023
https://dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev/2023/01/24/drop-185-2023-01-24-no-power-no-internet-no-theme/ |
https://dailydrop.hrbrmstr.dev/2023/02/16/drop-201-2023-02-16-summarise-this/ |
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