Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  This year's  International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC)   Web Archiving Conference (WAC)  took place in Hilversum, The Netherlands at The Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision. It was the first in-person event since 2019 and the 20th anniversary of IIPC! The program offered between two and three tracks for attendees to choose from, so this trip report will give a summary of the sessions I was able to attend. For more information on the other sessions, check out the full conference schedule  and the official hashtag ( #IIPCWAC23 ). Day One To kick off Day One, Eppo van Nispen  ( @eppovannispen ) from The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision gave the opening remarks. ✨ Super excited to follow the #IIPCWAC23 @NetPreserve organised by our colleagues @BeeldenGeluid @benglabs @KB_Nederland !👏🎉 💡Starting now! 🎉 Our director, Eppo asking AI how to start his introductory speech! Don't forget to quote @johanoomen 🎉 pic.twitter.com...

The eighth ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval ( #CHIIR2023 ) was held online in Austin, Texas, from March 19 to 23. After three years of virtual conferences, CHIIR 2023 switched to an in-person and online hybrid format. We ( Bhanuka , Mohan , Dr. Vikas Ashok , and Dr. Sampath Jayarathna ) presented our demonstration titled " DisETrac: Distributed Eye-Tracking for Online Collaboration " in person in Texas. Today I'm excited to join my first in-person conference since the start of my Ph.D. @ACM_CHIIR #CHIIIR2023 pic.twitter.com/8Y8nfR0EKs — Bhanuka Mahanama (@mahanama94) March 20, 2023 CHIIR is a well-established multi-and interdisciplinary conference with a research community engaged in human-computer interaction, information retrieval, information behavior, and human-information interaction. The full and perspective paper submissions of CHIIR 2023 comprised 26 accepted publications with an acceptance rate of 39.4%, presented over...

  Members of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative and invited guests gathered at the second annual CCI Symposium April 17 to 18, 2023, in Richmond, VA. Dr. Luiz DaSilva , executive director of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, presented the State of CCI speech at the 2022 CCI Symposium. In his speech, Dr. Silva mentioned the selected proposals for the “Securing Interactions between Humans and Machines” call this year. In a later workshop, funded projects from Virginia universities presented a short briefing on their projects . As the PI of one of the projects, I presented our research work on counter human smuggling. This is a collaborative work between  Dr. Faryaneh Poursardar ,  Dr. Vikas Ashok   from ODU CS, and  Dr. Erika Frydenlund   from  VMASC . Intentional misinformation and/or disinformation can play a large part in humanitarian crises involving human smuggling and trafficking. Human smugglers (also known as coyotes on the U.S. southern border)...

In a prior blog post , I discussed how  Neuropype  commercial software can be used for EEG data processing and analysis. While this tool provides a lot of capability and an academic license can be obtained for free, the free license is not available to all and may not be suitable for some applications. EEGLAB is a popular, well-maintained free tool that has been used to create a number of EEG preprocessing pipelines and perform analysis. However, it requires Mathworks MATLAB commercial software to run so it indirectly comes with a cost and licensing requirements.  MNE-Python As an alternative for those looking for fully open-source and/or programmatic ways to perform EEG data preprocessing and analysis, the MNE-Python package enables exploring, visualizing, and analyzing human neurophysiological data without licensing fees. However, it does require some programming skills to use.  If you already have Python installed on your computer, installing the MNE-Python lib...