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

Mat Kelly has received his PhD. This is the Final Blog Post                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           ⓖⓞⓖⓐⓣⓞⓡⓢ On May 7th, 2019, after a very long trek as a PhD student, I successfully defended my dissertation, "Aggregating Private and Public Web Archives Using the Mementity Framework" ( slides ). The tome (physical height still to be determined), originally titled, " A Framework for Aggregating Private and Public Web Archives " consisted of exactly that and a bit more. The crux of the work was originally presented in the best-paper-nominated paper with the latter named (hence the change) at JCDL 2018 ( arXiv ). The extended version addressed is

On May 11, 2019 I officially obtained my PhD in Computer Science from Old Dominion University. My graduate studies journey started when I received a full scholarship from the University of Hail in Saudi Arabia, where I worked there two years as a teacher assistant. I came to the USA and specifically to San Francisco in 2010 with my husband and my three-months old daughter. I attended Kaplan Institute where I took English classes and a GRE course for almost a year. After that I got accepted in ODU as a CS Masters student in 2011. In July 2013 I welcomed my second baby girl Jenna, and in August I graduated from the Master program and joined the PhD program to work with the wsdl (Web Science and Digital Libraries) research group there. On April 4, 2019, I defended my dissertation research, “ Expanding the usage of web archives by recommending archived webpages using only the URI ”  ( slides , video ) . The goal of my work was to build a model for selecting and ranking poss

From right to left, Dr. Nelson (my advisor), Yousof (my son), Yasmin (myself), Ahmed (my husband) August 26th marked my last day as a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at ODU , while September 26 marks my first day as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Data Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences at UC Berkeley . I will lead research in the areas of software curation, data science, and digital research methods. I will be honored to work under the supervision of Dr. Erik Mitchell , the Associate University Librarian and Director of Digital Initiatives and Collaborative Services at the University of California, Berkeley. I will have an opportunity to collaborate with many institutions across UC Berkeley, including the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) research unit. It is amazing to see the light at the end of the long tunnel. Below, I talk about the long trail I took to reach my academic dream position. I'll recap the topic of my dissertation, then I&