Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  In this figure, nine document versions (grey) are shown ordered with respect to time. The versions have different term frequencies, represented by the score axis. The nine original versions are coalesced into three versions (black) in the inverted index. (Source: Berberich , Figure 3.3) According to a user survey conducted by the National Library of the Netherlands in 2007, full-text search is the top requested feature for web archives. Some web archives do allow for the public to perform full-text searches, while other web archives only allow the public to search by website address. For web archives that have implemented full-text search, every version of a document may be indexed, regardless of the similarity between consecutive document versions. In “ Temporal Search in Web Archives ” (2010), Berberich develops time-travel text search to improve searching in web archives. What extensions to existing architecture will support full-text search with respect to time across vers...

  On April 13, 2022, we held our second annual WS-DL Research Expo .  Our 2021 Research Expo was so successful that we decided to make this an annual event toward the end of the spring semester.  We stuck with the same format: one student from each professor giving a short overview of their research.  Links to all the materials are gathered in the GitHub repo , but here again is the list of students and their presentations: Corren McCoy : " A Relevance-Based Model for Ranking Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities " Bhanuka Mahanama : " Multi-User Eye-Tracking: Developments and Challenges " Javedul Ferdous : " InSupport: Proxy Interface for Enabling Efficient Non-Visual Interaction with Web Data Records " Lamia Salsabil : " A Study of Computational Reproducibility using URLs Linking to Open Access Datasets and Software " Emily Escamilla : " Archiving Source Code in Scholarly Content: One in Five Articles References GitHub " We were fortunate e...

The 2022 CCI Symposium , hosted by the Virginia Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, was held at the Omni Hotel, Richmond, VA on April 4, 2022, and April 5, 2022. As an awardee of the CCI seed grant on misinformation and disinformation, I presented our project in a speed briefing and a poster, with my student Saad Khan. In this trip report, I outline the symposium, highlight selected talks and posters, and list old and new friends. I also believe networking is an important purpose of coming to a face-to-face meeting.  State of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative by   Luiz DaSilva In this presentation, Dr. Luiz DaSilva, executive director of CCI, systematically summarized the state of the CCI program in four aspects: research, innovation, workforce development, and impact. Since its inauguration, the CCI program has had more than 300 researchers from at least 40 higher education institutions in Virginia. It has four nodes, Northern Virginia Node ( NOVA , directed by Dr.  Liza Wil...

  Disinformation that spreads on the Web and social media isn't just a nuisance, it causes real harm. There is a consensus that a significant amount of false or misleading information is deliberately made to confuse, influence, harm, mobilize, or demobilize a target audience. The widespread use of social media has provided more channels for disseminating disinformation. Disinformation also exists in the form of “fake news”, consisting of deliberate misinformation. Unfortunately, due to the lack of understanding of the basic and/or the best available science, and the limited accessibility of credible information, a vast number of citizens are susceptible to disinformation. We are excited to receive 2022 National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduate Site (REU Site) award worth $$324,000 for three years for this research towards " Research Experiences for Undergraduates in Disinformation Detection and Analytics ."  Our REU Site ( http://reu.cs.odu...

Most GitHub users are aware of *.github.io as a GitHub hosted website. But, before there was *.github.io, ( https://elescamilla.github.io ) there was *.github.com (https://elescamilla.github.com) that had the exact same functionality. What caused the change? On April 5, 2013, GitHub released a statement that they would be deprecating *.github.com for security reasons. In the post, they said that "all traffic will be redirected to the new *.github.io location indefinitely,  so you won't have to change any links". However, on January 29, 2021, they released an updated statement that they would stop redirecting *github.com to *.github.io starting April 15, 2021 to further address security concerns. They recommended that users "remove any external references to *.github.com". To encourage users to update any external links, they scheduled two " brown out " dates and notified users of the upcoming change. But... In most situations, it is difficult to modi...

My name is Yasasi Abeysinghe . I am an international student from Sri Lanka. I joined Old Dominion University as a Ph.D. student in Spring 2022 under the supervision of Dr. Sampath Jayarathna . My current research project involves evaluating human eye (oculomotor plant) features for an objective measure of working memory capacity. My research interests include machine learning, data science, human-computer interaction, and eye-tracking. Ever since I stepped into the study of science in my early school days, I have been intrigued by the vastness of the field. My passion towards the field to explore and learn new things has carried me on a journey since then. In December 2018, I graduated with a B.Sc. Engineering (Hons) degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Moratuwa with first-class honors. In the final year of my undergraduate degree program, I conducted my research on “Generation of Review Aspect Hierarchy using Word Embedding and Clustering”, u...

The 36th AAAI conference was held online between February 28 and March 1, 2022. I co-authored a demo paper titled " A synthetic prediction market for estimating confidence in published work " with my collaborators at Pennsylvania State University and Rutgers University. I also got a paper accepted by the 2nd Workshop on Advances, Resources, Tools, and Challenges of Scientific Document Understanding (SDU) , titled " Segmenting Technical Drawing Figures in US Patents ", with my collaborators at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).  In this blog post, I focus on briefing four papers presented in the SDU workshop held on March 1, 2022, including my paper. Most papers mentioned in this blog post are highly relevant to my research in the field of mining scholarly big data.  1. Segmenting Technical Drawing Figures in US Patents (Hoque et al., ODU & LANL) This is our paper. The goal is to segment compound figures that include multiple subfigures. The paper compared ...