Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

I'm thrilled to share an exciting news—my very first NSF proposal has been funded!  This award is a NSF Smart and Connected Communities Planning Grant for one year and worth $150,000 titled Advancing Health Equity: Integrating LLM Technology into Homeless Telehealth Services for Chronic Disease Education . This project is a collaboration between Dr. Tina Gustin and me . As communities across the United States and around the world undergo significant transformations, the integration of rapidly evolving intelligent technologies is reshaping how residents interact with their environments. This era of transformation holds immense potential to enhance well-being and prosperity, yet it also presents complex challenges at the intersection of technology and society. Recognizing these opportunities and challenges, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has launched the Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) program to lay the groundwork for smart communities that drive economic gro...

  Figure 1: The schematic overview of the project, including main components (lower) and stakeholders (upper).  In collaboration with Dr. Sawood Alam at the  Internet Archive , Dr. Edward Fox at Virginia Tech, and Bill Ingram at Virginia Tech Libraries, I am so grateful to receive an award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) this year. The title of my grant is  Preserving Open Access Datasets and Software for Sustained Computational Reproducibility . The total amount is about $564k. The official webpage of this award is https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/lg-256694-ols-24 .  Recently, concerns of reproducibility have been raised in multiple academic disciplines such as the Social and Behavioral Sciences , Biomedical and Life Sciences , and Computer and Information Sciences . Datasets and software packages are crucial resources to many research domains requiring data analysis. Collberg and Proebsting found that a large ...

  EICS 2024 marks the sixteenth international ACM SIGCHI conference, focused on engineering interactive computing systems and their user interfaces. The conference explores research at the intersection of user interface design, software engineering, and computational interaction. Our research paper, " All in One Place: Ensuring Usable Access to Online Shopping Items for Blind Users ," was published in the June 2024 issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 8, in the EICS category . In this blog post, I will summarize our research paper, which focuses on alleviating the significant interaction challenges that blind users encounter when navigating through dispersed content across multiple sections and pages on shopping websites. These issues arise because information related to shopping items is frequently spread across different web page sect...

  https://xkcd.com/2173/   Six courses from the Web Science and Digital Libraries ( W S-DL ) Group will be offered for Fall 2024.  The classes will be a mixture of on-line, f2f, and hybrid.  CS 432/532 Web Science,  Ms.  Nasreen Muhammad Arif , asynchronous   Topics : Python, R, D3, ML, and IR.   CS 433/533 Web Security , Dr.   Michael L. Nelson , asynchronous    Topics : HTTP, Cross-Site Request Forgery, Same Origin Policy, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Fingerprinting, Denial-of-service, Phishing.  CS 620 Intro to Data Science & Analytics , Dr.   Sampath Jayarathna , Web, Tuesdays & Thursdays 6-7:15   Topics : Python, Pandas, NumPy, NoSQL, Data Wrangling, ML, Colab. CS 625 Data Visualization ,  Dr.   Michele C. Weigle , asynchronous  Topics : Tableau, Python Seaborn, Matplotlib, Vega-Lite, Observable, Markdown, OpenRefine, data cleaning, visual perception, visualization design, exp...

The ACM ASSETS Conference , formally known as the International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, is a leading forum for presenting research on the design, evaluation, and use of computing and information technologies to assist people with disabilities and older adults. ASSETS is dedicated to exploring how technology can support accessibility and inclusivity for individuals with special needs. The conference covers a wide range of topics related to accessible computing, including assistive technologies, user interfaces, and inclusive design practices. In this blog post, I write about the most recent work co-authored by Dr. Vikas Ashok , titled " Enabling Uniform Computer Interaction Experience for Blind Users through Large Language Models ," published in ASSETS '24 .  Motivation Blind individuals who rely on screen readers, such as JAWS , VoiceOver , and NVDA , face significant challenges when interacting with computer applications designed primaril...

Embarking on an internship is often a transformative experience, and my journey has been no exception. Over the past few months, I've had the opportunity to dive deep into the intricate world of data science, corporate compliance, and policy-making, all while gaining a fresh perspective on the ever-evolving expectations of Gen Z in the workplace. Here’s a glimpse into what my internship has entailed and the valuable lessons I've learned along the way. PRA Group is pleased to welcome our 2024 interns! Coming to us from across the U.S., these 13 young professionals will bring fresh perspectives and innovative new ideas to our global headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. #PRAGroup #FinancialServices #LifeAtPRA #BuildYourCareer pic.twitter.com/A43ix90lnh — PRA Group (@PRAGroupInc) June 17, 2024 Crafting Policies for a PRAGroup One of the primary responsibilities I undertook during my internship was the development of policies to regulate and audit external tools and internal prog...

The Internet Archive TV News Archive is a service provided by the Internet Archive that enables users to search across a collection of television news programs. As of May 2024, the TV News Archive provides access to clips from 2.88 million US broadcast shows dating back to 2009 for research and educational purposes. For over a decade, journalists and scholars have used its collections to varying extents in over 2,000 articles and research publications. As illustrated in Figure 1, the TV News Archive data available to the public includes video clips of broadcasts and closed captions. The Internet Archive also provides access to chyrons (the "lower thirds" of TV screens displaying breaking news and highlights). Figure 1: Video clip from the TV News Archive displaying closed captions and a chyron (lower thirds) providing breaking news. Link to the video clip: https://archive.org/details/CNNW_20240503_133000_Trump_Hush_Money_Trial/start/5958/end/6018   Several tools have emerge...