Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

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

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

Figure 1 (click figure to enlarge): Illustration of the level of attention given to the Democratic National Convention (DNC) story by news organization measured with StoryGraph's longitudinal data. The y-axis represents the average degree or attention score of the Connected Components (CC) which represents stories about the DNC story and other stories (e.g., Mail voting - green diamond) that occurred between August 17 and August 21, 2020 (x-axis). The four annotated peaks --- with average degree median 11.88 --- of the DNC story corresponds with discussions surrounding Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden. The subscripts represent the document frequencies of the bigram annotations. For example ," Michelle Obama " occurred 31 times in the text of the CC documents. The Democratic Party held the Democratic National Convention (DNC) from August 17, 2020 to August 20, 2020. The following week, from August 24 to August 27, the Republican Party held the Repub

Fig. 1: Three connected components from three different StoryGraphs, representing three different news stories. The first connected component represents the news story about North Korea considering firing missiles at Guam , the second, the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan , and the third, AG William Barr's release of his summary of the Mueller Report . A lot has happened in three years. We've seen threats of war , hurricanes Harvey / Irma / Maria , upsets in  elections ,  a royal wedding , an impeachment , a pandemic , etc. For all these stories and many more, for three years, every 10-minutes, StoryGraph has been reading the news, generating news similarity graphs, and quantifying the level of attention news stories receive. August 8, 2020 marked the third year since StoryGraph went live. In this blogpost, I will take a retrospective look at the studies StoryGraph has enabled and a promise multiple services and studies for the future. StoryGraph's Past: studies a

Md Javedul Ferdous M.S. in Computer Science, AIUB, 2019 B.S. in  Computer Science and Engineering , EWU, 2016 Hello, I am a doctoral student at Old Dominion University (ODU) , Norfolk, VA. I received a master’s degree in Computer Science at American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB) , Dhaka, Bangladesh. At ODU, I'm working with the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL)  research group under the supervision of Dr. Vikas Ashok . My research projects include human-computer interaction, deep Learning, and algorithm-based problem-solving.  I have research experience in computer vision, deep learning, and the Bayesian algorithm. My master’s thesis research was on classification, computation, and movement of an object and their corresponding relationship. In this project, I used a region-based fully convolutional network and a long and short-term memory-based model. For the dissertation of my bachelor’s degree, I worked on the Bayesian Network to verify the Software Product L

As a new member of WS-DL group, I like to share a bit of my story before joining ODU CS. I have received my BS and MS in Computer Engineering in Iran. I have graduated with a PhD degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University in 2018.  I was a member of the  Center for the Study of the Digital Libraries (CSDL) group. I have worked with Dr. Frank Shipman . My research interests are in Computer Human Information Interaction, Data Science, Machine Learning and Data Mining, Information Retrieval, Digital Libraries, Web Archive, Digital Data Preservation, and Social Computing. I have years of experience in teaching computer science courses. While I was working on my PhD research remotely, I kept my connection with academia and have taught several different courses at Computer Science department at Virginia Tech for two years (2017-2019). My family and I moved to Norfolk last year (Fall 2019) and I started as a full-time faculty at Physics, Computer Science and Engineering

Click to expand: Overview of StoryGraph illustrating the process of generating a news similarity graph is four primary steps. The four steps are explained in the StoryGraph Tech Report We never did give StoryGraph  a proper introduction. Over three years, I have tweeted, created a Twitter account ( @storygraphbot ) for StoryGraph, and published two blogposts that utilized the StoryGraph service to determine the top news stories of 2018 and 2019 . But I never really introduced and motivated the need for StoryGraph. I hoped that the  Computation + Journalism Symposium  would provide the opportunity for giving StoryGraph a proper introduction, but the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted it. To commemorate #ElectionDay , Same domain story linking results for October 2018 (for @BreitbartNews @FoxNews @CNN @HuffPost ) shows stories news media focused on 1 month before the elections. pic.twitter.com/Xw196Y66Mi — StoryGraph (@storygraphbot) November 6, 2018 The Computation + Jou