Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The increasing ubiquity of gaze-aware technologies (commonly referred to as eye trackers)  have enabled assessing patterns in our complex visual interaction with the surrounding world. We can characterize these complex interactions through gaze and pupil signals and extract them through eye trackers. Recent technological advancements in computer vision, image processing, and deep learning have led to the development of eye-trackers with a wide range of utility from consumer to research applications. As a result, gaze-aware technologies have the capability of mass adoption.  Analysis of oculomotor events (left), analysis methods (center), and measures (right) With the increasing utility of eye-tracking measures in human-computer interaction and research, a practitioner needs an aggregate body of knowledge. Our study, Eye Movement and Pupil Measures: A Review , tries to address the requirement by reviewing a selection of relevant prior research studies. For this purpose, we firs...

I'm very excited to announce our recent publication at the prestigious "ACM Computing Surveys" journal. Vijini Mallawaarachchi, Lakmal Meegahapola, Roshan Madhushanka, Eranga Heshan, Dulani Meedeniya, and Sampath Jayarathna. "Change Detection and Notification of Web Pages: A Survey." ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 53, no. 1 (2020): 1-35 ArXiv copy is available at  https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.02660 We present our work on various aspects of change detection and notification systems, and different techniques used for each aspect including current challenges and areas of improvement within the field of research.  This project was initially a part of the early work at the Texas A&M University Center for the study of Digital Libraries (CSDL) group , on building a topic modeling based change detection classifier for ACM Conference proceedings. These initial results were presented at ACM Hypertext 2016, and IEEE Big Data Special Session on Data Mining 2016....

One publisher, more than 7000 retractions Science magazine: More than 7000 abstracts are quietly retracted from the IEEE database. Most of these abstracts are from IEEE conferences that took place between 2009 and 2011.  The plot below clearly shows when the retraction happened. The reason was weird:  " After careful and  considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee,  this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE’s Publication Principles. " Similar things happened in Nature subsidiary journal ( link ) and other journals ( link ). The question is can we find them from internet archive? Can they still be legally posted on a digital library like CiteSeerX? If they do, they can provide a very unique training dataset to be used for fraud and/or plagiarism detection, assuming that the reason under the hood is one of them.  Jian Wu