Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Figure 1: Mementos from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine showing the deletion of the entire LGBTQ youth resources page on the Virginia Department of Health website between  2023-05-31 and  2023-06-01 In July 2023, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin received national press for deleting webpages on the Virginia Department of Health website containing LGBTQ+ youth resources. This isn't the first time the Youngkin administration has deleted webpages: within one week of his inauguration, he deleted the Virginia Mathematics Pathways Initiative website . The Washington Post article from July 2023 also discussed additional webpages that had content removed in 2022. Journalists discovered these webpage changes through emails between state employees, but the emails didn't contain the website addresses. Without linking to mementos at a web archive, readers of the articles can't see the changes for themselves. Not linking to archived webpages in news articles is consistent w...

A distributed system refers to a collection of interconnected computers or nodes that work together to achieve a common goal. Real-time visualization of data collected from multiple nodes in a distributed system allows us to identify trends and patterns as they emerge. Moreover, interactive visualizations let us explore, analyze, and share insights into data through interactive controls, filtering options, and drill-down capabilities. In a distributed system, having a real-time interactive dashboard enables real-time decision-making, supports exploratory data analysis, facilitates communication and collaboration, enhances monitoring and alerts, strengthens predictive analytics, and empowers interactive data exploration. In this blog, I present an approach for developing an interactive visualization dashboard for real-time data in a distributed system using Python . In this approach, we use the MQTT broker as the messaging protocol between the computers and the dashboard,...

Figure 2 Hafner et al. : The authors of this work consider four visual domains, including robot locomotion and manipulation tasks, Atari games with 2D graphics, DMLab, and Minecraft. DreamerV3 is successful in all of these diverse domains, demonstrating its ability to handle spatial and temporal reasoning challenges.  In my last post , Paper Summary: "Beyond Classifiers: Remote Sensing Change Detection with Metric Learning" Zhang et al., I reviewed methods to detect discrete changes in temporal visual data. But what if we're concerned with the fidelity of simulated or generative data vs. the real world? In my work at NASA, I study machine learning methods for training autonomous systems in simulation. One of the biggest problems with this research direction is the Simulation-to-Reality problem, where training in simulation can result in relatively high uncertainty due to differences between the simulated representation of the environm...

Introduction The realm of concerns surrounding reproducibility, replicability, and generalizability (RR&G) of findings has gained substantial attention within the social and behavioral sciences as well as artificial intelligence (AI). While these concerns have evolved over the past decade and have seen recognition in top-tier journals, they have recently extended their reach into the field of AI. Inconsistencies in terminologies have led to the adoption of precise definitions from Goodman et al. (2016) [7]. Reproducibility refers to consistent computational results under the same conditions, replicability involves achieving consistent results on similar datasets, and generalizability pertains to consistent results across different experimental contexts. AI's reproducibility studies have mostly targeted empirical and computational AI, focusing on open datasets, code availability, and metadata documentation. However, efforts towards the replicability of AI research have remained...

The significance of multilingual datasets for Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) research cannot be exaggerated. The lack of publicly available, annotated, multilingual datasets prompted this effort. Moreover, Arabic is one of the languages for which annotated datasets are not widely available. In this post, we present a collection of Arabic and English news URLs dataset collected from four different major Arabic and English news outlets that are geared towards Arabs, English speaking Arabs, Arabic speakers around the world, and English speakers who are interested in the Arabic narratives of world news ( Aljazeera Arabic , Alarabiya , Aljazeera English , and Arab News ). Such a collection can be used to conduct research on web archiving, news similarity, machine translation (MT), Arabic Named Entity Recognition and Classification (NERC), and perform a systematic comparisons of different approaches. We examined multiple ways to collect news stories' URLs from multiple news ...