Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On January 18, 2019, the Web Science and Digital Libraries Group hosted Prof. Ed Fox from Va Tech for the colloquium " Integrating Research and Education Regarding Global Event and Trend Archiving ".  After the colloquium we had a working lunch where three of our PhD students briefed Dr. Fox on their current status.  Photos and links are included in the Twitter thread below. --Michael . @WebSciDL was honored to host @edwardafox of @VT_CS for a @oducs colloquium "Integrating Research and Education Regarding Global Event and Trend Archiving" pic.twitter.com/nxWQLF4TdF — Michael L. Nelson (@phonedude_mln) January 19, 2019 Our distinguished speaker today at CS colloquium, Prof. Ed Fox  from Virginia Tech @VT_CS @WebSciDL @oducs pic.twitter.com/cpercRJCgf — Sampath Jayarathna (@OpenMaze) January 18, 2019 We had a working lunch afterwards where four @WebSciDL PhD students briefed Prof. Fox on their research status. pic.twitter.com/qMiLgUWZNq...

We had a great #jcdl2018 / #wadl2018 / @jcdl2018 ! Here is the 2018 @WebSciDL reunion photo, but we're getting so large we weren't all there at once! Not pictured: Incoming fac (Fall 2018): @OpenMaze @fanchyna Alum: @johnaberlin See you June 2-6, 2019 @iSchoolUI @JCDLConf pic.twitter.com/GmKpqKg0Zs — Michael L. Nelson (@phonedude_mln) June 7, 2018 Morning commute @ODU @WebSciDL #BombCyclone pic.twitter.com/4VXFDq8xvj — Alexander C. Nwala (@acnwala) January 4, 2018 The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group had a strong year, with the most significant event being our expansion from two professors to four.  Beginning in Fall 2018, we added two new assistant professors: Dr. Sampath Jayarathna ( @OpenMaze ) joined us from the CSDL of Texas A&M and  most recently from California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly Pomona).  Dr. Jian Wu ( @fanchyna ) joined us from the CiteSeerX group at  Penn State University.  ...

" Both arXiv and archive.org are invaluable projects which, if they didn't exist, we would dismiss as obviously ridiculous and unworkable." A record five WS-DL classes are offered for Spring 2019: CS 432/532 Web Science is taught by Alexander Nwala , Thursdays 4:20-7:00pm.  This class explores web phenomena with a variety of data science tools such as Python, R, D3, ML, and IR.  CS 725/825 Information Visualization is taught by Dr. Michele C. Weigle , Wednesdays 9:30am-12:15pm. This class will explore the background and tools needed to develop effective visualizations through analyzing existing visualizations and visualization problems. CS 734/834 Information Retrieval is taught by Dr. Jian Wu , Tuesdays & Thursdays, 9:30-10:45am.  This class will explore the theory and engineering of information retrieval in the context of developing web-based search engines. CS 795/895 Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is taught by Dr. Sampath Jayarathna , Tuesdays...

CoQA is a dataset containing more than 127,000 questions with answers collected from more than 8000 conversations. Each conversation is about a passage in the form of questions and answers. One example of the passage is below Once upon a time, in a barn near a farm house, there lived a little white kitten named Cotton. Cotton lived high up in a nice warm place above the barn where all of the farmer's horses slept. But Cotton wasn't alone in her little home above the barn, oh no. She shared her hay bed with her mommy and 5 other sisters. All of her sisters were cute and fluffy, like Cotton. But she was the only white one in the bunch. The rest of her sisters were all orange with beautiful white tiger stripes like Cotton's mommy. Being different made Cotton quite sad. She often wished she looked like the rest of her family. So one day, when Cotton found a can of the old farmer's orange paint, she used it to paint herself like them. When her mommy and sisters found...

The IEEE Big Data 2018 was held in the Westin Seattle Hotel between December 10 and December 13, 2018. There are more than 1100 people registered. The accepting rates vary between 13% to 24%, with an average rate of 19%. I have a poster accepted titled “CiteSeerX-2018: A Cleansed Multidisciplinary Scholarly Big Dataset”, co-authored with C. Lee Giles , two of his graduate students ( Bharath and Shaurya ), as well as an undergraduate student who produced preliminary results ( Jianyu Mao ). I attended the conference on Day 2 and Day 3 and left the conference hotel after the keynote on Day 3. Insights from Personal Meetings The most important thing to attend conferences is to meet with old friends and know new friends. Old friends I met include Kyle Williams (Microsoft Bing), Mu Qiao (IBM, chair of I&G track), Yang Song (Google AI, co-chair of I&G track), Manlin Li (Google Cloud), and Madian Khabsa (Apple Siri).  Kyle introduced the recent project on rec...

Mat Kelly reports on his recent trip to Washington, DC for the CNI Fall 2018 meeting                                                                                                                                                             ...