Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Large, Dynamic and Ubiquitous –The Era of the Digital Library JCDL 2015 ( #JCDL2015 ) took place at the University of Tennessee Conference Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. The conference was four days long; June 21-25, 2015. This year three students from our WS-DL CS group at ODU  had their papers accepted as well as one poster (see trip reports for 2014, 2013 , 2012 , 2011 ). Dr. Weigle ( @weiglemc ), Dr. Nelson ( @phonedude_mln ), Sawood Alam ( @ibnesayeed ), Mat Kelly ( @machawk1 ) and I ( @LulwahMA ) went to the conference. We drove from Norfolk, VA. Four of our previous members of our group, Martin Klein (UCLA, CA) ( @mart1nkle1n ), Joan Smith (Linear B Systems, inc., VA) ( @joansm1th ), Ahmed Alsum (Stanford University, CA) ( @aalsum ) and Hany SalahEldeen (Microsoft, Seattle)( @hanysalaheldeen ), also met us there. The trip was around 8 hours. We enjoyed the mountain views and the beautiful farms. We also caught parts of a storm on our way, but it only lasted for ...

The Old Dominion University Web Science and Digital Libraries (WSDL) research group was well-represented at the JCDL 2013 conference – Digital Libraries at the Crossroads . We arrived in Indianapolis, Indiana on Sunday night. While Hany SalahEldeen and I took time on Monday to ready our presentations, Scott Ainsworth and Yasmin AlNoamany presented at the Doctoral Consortium . Scott presented his research on improving temporal drift in the archives, and Yasmin presented her work on creating a story from mementos. Their presentations (and doctoral consortium) are discussed in more detail in their blog posting . Day 1 After opening remarks from J. Stephen Downie and Robert H. McDonald , Clifford Lynch gave the opening keynote of the conference entitled "Building Social Scale Information Infrastructure: Challenges of Coherence, Interoperability and Priority." Lynch posed a series of questions that are influencing the research areas in th...

It all started in San Francisco airport while waiting to get my luggage on my way to the PDA2011 conference. The recruiter from Microsoft called me to inform me that I have been accepted to intern at Microsoft Silicon Valley this summer. I was ecstatic and after a couple of months of bureaucracy and a ton of documents I was ready to leave Norfolk by the end of May. Since I haven’t been on an adventure or a trip for a long time, and since I will definitely need a car in California for the three months of the summer, I decided to drive my car all across the continent. I have always wanted to make a road trip like that where I can stop in every city or town along the way, check out their attractions and eat from their authentic cuisines. At the same time, our colleague and best friend Moustafa Aly managed to secure a job at Amazon’s engineering office in San Francisco . So when he knew I was going to drive all the way there he told me: “forget the plane, I will join you!” We left Norfo...