Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is almost 20 years old. As the Wayback Machine nears its second decade full of operation, I reflected on how my research has been inspired by the work that goes into enabling the historical replay of the web.   The @waybackmachine is officially old enough to vote but not drink this year. 468 Billion web pages and more than 1,000,000,000,000 captures later, the Wayback Machine is still public, free, and committed to access for all. https://t.co/EdYMeVz2q5 — Internet Archive (@internetarchive) October 26, 2020 I’ve been away from the WS-DL blog for a little while, so a reintroduction is probably worthwhile. I am a PhD alumnus from the WS-DL group and am currently a Principal Researcher at The MITRE Corporation . As you may guess, my work in the WS-DL group focused on web archiving and specifically the crawler and information collection trade-offs of using crawlers that exercise JavaScript on web pages (e.g., Brozzler ) vs those that...

As I have mentioned previously , I am the MITRE chair of the Federal Cloud Computing summit . The Summits are designed to allow representatives from government agencies that would not necessarily cross paths to collaborate and learn from one another about the best practices, challenges, and recommendations for adopting emerging technologies in the federal government. The MITRE- ATARC Collaboration Symposium is a working group-style session in which academics, representatives from industry, government, and FFRDC representatives discuss potential solutions and ways-forward for the top challenges of emerging technology adoption in government. MITRE helps select the challenge areas by polling government practitioners on their top challenges, and the participants break into groups to discuss each challenge area. The Collaboration Symposium allows this heterogeneous group of cloud practitioners to collaborate across all levels, from the end users to researchers to pract...

As part of my 9-to-5 job at The MITRE Corporation , I lead several STEM outreach efforts in the local academic community. One of our partnerships with the New Horizon's Governor's School for Science and Technology  pairs high school seniors with professionals in STEM careers. Wes Jordan has been working with me since October 2014 as part of this program and for his senior mentorship project as a requirement for graduation from the Governor's School. Wes has developed Mobile Mink (soon to be available in the Google Play store). Inspired by Mat Kelly's Mink add-on for Chrome, Wes adapted the functionality to an Android application. This blog post discusses the motivation for and operation of Mobile Mink. Motivation The growth of the mobile web has encouraged web archivists to focus on ensuring its thorough archiving. However, the mobile URIs are not as prevalent in the archives as their non-mobile (or as we will refer to them:  desktop ) URIs. This is apparent when...

On January 14th-15th, I attended the  Federal Cloud Computing Summit  in Washington, D.C., a recurring event in which I have participated in the past. In my continuing role as the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Session lead, I assisted the host organization, the  Advanced Technology And Research Center  (ATARC) in organizing and run the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Sessions. The summit is designed to allow Government representatives to meeting and collaborate with industry, academic, and other Government cloud computing practitioners on the current challenges in cloud computing. The collaboration sessions continue to be highly valued within the government and industry. The Winter 2015 Summit had over 400 government or academic registrants and more than 100 industry registrants. The  whitepaper summarizing the Summer 2014 collaboration sessions  is now available. A discussion of  FedRAMP  and the future of the policies was held in a Governmen...

As mention in my previous post , I attended the Federal Cloud Computing Summit on July 8th and 9th at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. I helped the host organization, the Advanced Technology And Research Center (ATARC) organize and run the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Sessions that kick off the event on July 8th. The summit is designed to allow Government representatives to meeting and collaborate with industry, academic, and other Government cloud computing practitioners on the current challenges in cloud computing. A FedRAMP  primer was held at 10:00 AM on July 8th in a Government-only session. At its conclusion, we began the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Sessions that focused on Cloud Computing in Austere Environments, Cloud Computing for the Mobile Worker, Security as a Service, and the Impact of Cloud Computing on the Enterprise. Because participants are protected by Chathan House Rule , I cannot elaborate on the Government representation or discussions in the...

I was invited to present an overview on Agile Development to Old Dominion University 's ACM chapter . More specifically, I gave an overview of the Scrum method . My work in MITRE 's Agile Engineering department has allowed me to practice Agile methodologies in the work force. Through this presentation, I shared my experiences with the members of the ACM. Agile Engineering - ODU ACM from Justin Brunelle Agile engineering's main focus is a shift from a linear development model. The Waterfall model is the classic example of a linear process model. Agile focuses on a cyclic and adaptive model. One of the main focuses of Agile is to receive and incorporate user feedback into the development process in order to produce a better product for the user. Also, it allows the product owner to garner greater control over a project. Each cycle in Agile includes all of the traditional development steps: Requirements, Design, Implementation, Verification, and Assessment...

I have just returned from MITRE 's Records Expo on MITRE's Campus in McLean, VA . The Records Expo is designed to raise awareness of the archival responsibilities of employees within MITRE, and also inform our sponsors about the archives and records management work we're doing. I was invited to present some of the research being done in digital preservation at ODU and MITRE. (George Despres and I have recently received funding to perform digital preservation research on the digital objects living within the corporate intranet. Our research was explained at the Expo.) Records expo View more presentations from Justin Brunelle We set up booths in the MITRE 2 building, equipped with big-screen TVs with slide shows about other archival and records management systems being pioneered at MITRE (the slides are For Office Use Only, and cannot be shared in this blog). Several MITRE employees attended and listened to presentations given by the archives team and the records...