Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  (source:  https://2021.jcdl.org/ ) The 2021 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2021) was hosted virtually due to the global pandemic by the School of Information Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) between September 27-30, 2021. This year our members of the  Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group (WSDL) attended paper sessions, posters and demo sessions, workshops, and tutorials, where researchers from multiple disciplines presented their findings virtually via Zoom room through the Conference Virtual Platform ( RDMobile ). The posters and demo session took place via Zoom and Gather.town . This year, seven papers (5 long and 2 short) plus four posters  from our WSDL group were accepted to JCDL 2021. Unlike previous years , we did not feature any students or faculty in this year's JCDL doctoral consortium. We are hopeful to resume it next year. Day 1 Tutorial 1 Day 1 kicked off with Tutorials and th...

Earlier in 2021,  the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) announced a call for proposals  themed Role of Cybersecurity on Curbing the Spread of Disinformation and Misinformation and Disinformation . The theme was the role of cybersecurity on curbing the spread of disinformation and misinformation. Traditionally, cybersecurity was about solutions of protecting computers and information systems from information disclosure, damage of hardware, software, and electronic data. Recently,  many researchers realized that combating misinformation and disinformation (MIDIS) should be incorporated into the scope because MIDIS is also the delivery package of malicious attackers, whether intentional or unintentional. Such information can cause subsequent damage to hardware and software, people's health, and even the society.  Figure 1 : LexisNexis appearances of “fake news” in newspaper coverage in the United States and globally. Courtesy: Scheufele & Krause (2018) S...

I grew up as a college sports fan.  I remember learning to count by twos from watching basketball games and learning my sevens times-table from college football. Sometimes I'd even cheer for my team to miss a free throw just so the numbers of the score would stay even.  Since I lived near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, my favorite team was the LSU Tigers.  I was in high school when Shaq played college basketball there.  In high school, I played on the girl's basketball team and was a fan of the LSU women's basketball team.  LSU's coach when I was growing up (and until 2004) was the legendary Sue Gunter .  I went to UNC for graduate school and while I was there, I attended many, many great women's basketball games in Carmichael Arena , where Michael Jordan had played college ball (though, several years before my time). While I was in grad school, LSU's women's team was doing well and had a bit of a rivalry with Tennessee (though not quite as big as it would be ...

This Summer, I was accepted as a Graduate Student in the Institutional Scientific Content (ISC) Team, a sub division of the  Research Library at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) . LANL is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, located in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the southwestern United States. Its mission is to solve national security challenges through scientific excellence. This year, LANL continued its student internship program for Summer 2021. Approximately 1500 students joined LANL to work on various projects during this Summer. Due to social distancing restrictions, most internships were limited to remote work off laboratory property. My internship was a 12 weeks program which started on 7th of June, 2021. During this internship program, I worked remotely as a Research Intern, under the supervision of Brian Cain . Throughout this program, I attended meetings with my supervisor,  Brian Cain  and the development team, development sessions,...