Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

At the Internet Archive, it was rainy in San Francisco, but that did not deter those of us attending Dodging the Memory Hole 2017 . We engaged in discussions about a very important topic: the preservation of online news content. An attendee listens to a presentation at the @RJI Dodging the Memory Hole conference in San Francisco. #DTMH2017 pic.twitter.com/2ajM1k06Ru — RJI Futures Lab (@RJIFuturesLab) November 16, 2017 Keynote: Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian for the Internet Archive "Let's become a library. Let's be useful to society to understand ourselves." ― @brewster_kahle #DTMH2017 pic.twitter.com/rg7hMqWBdI — JDNA (@RJIJDNA) November 15, 2017 Brewster Kahle is well known in digital preservation and especially web archiving circles. He founded the Internet Archive in May 1996 . The WS-DL and LANL's Prototyping Team collaborate heavily with those from the Internet Archive, so hearing his talk was quite inspirational.

While researching my dissertation topic, I re-encountered the paper, " Routing Memento Requests Using Binary Classifiers " by Bornand, Balakireva, and Van de Sompel from JCDL 2016 ( arXiv:1606.09136v1 ). The high-level gist of this paper is that by using two corpora of URI-Rs consisting of requests to their Memento aggregator (one for training, the other for training evaluation), the authors were able to significantly mitigate wasted requests to archives that contained no mementos for a requested URI-R. For each of the 17 Web archives included in the experiment, with the exception of the Internet Archive on the assumption that a positive result would always be returned, a classifier was generated. The classifiers informed the decision of, given a URI-R, whether the respective Web archive should be queried. Optimization of this sort has been performed before. For example, AlSum et al. from TPDL 2013 ( trip report , IJDL 2014 , and arXiv ) created profiles for 12 Web a

The crowds descended upon Arlington, Virginia for the 80th annual meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology . I attended this meeting to learn more about ASIS&T , including its special interest groups . Also attending with me was former ODU Computer Science student and current Los Alamos National Laboratory librarian Valentina Neblitt-Jones . Shawn and Valentina - ODU and Los Alamos National Lab #asist2017 pic.twitter.com/0hf6qvM5js — Valentina (@vneblitt) November 1, 2017 The ASIS&T team had organized a wonderful collection of panels, papers, and other activities for us to engage in. Plenary Speakers Richard Marks: Head of the PlayStation Magic Lab at Sony Interactive Entertainment Richard Marks talked about the importance of play to the human experience. He covered innovations at the Playstation Magic Lab in an effort to highlight possible futures of human-computer interaction. The goal of the laboratory is "experience engin

This year’s Grace Hopper Celebration 2017 ( @ghc , #GHC17 ), the world's largest gathering of women technologists, took place in Orlando Florida at the Orange County Convention Center on October 4-6. The events occurred in two locations: the Orange County Convention Center West (OCCC) and the Hyatt Regency (Hyatt), which is directly connected by skybridge. GHC is presented by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology , which was founded by Dr. Anita Borg and Dr. Telle Whitney in 1994. Grace Hopper attendees grew from 500 in 1994 to over 18,000 in 2017 with around 700 speakers. Its incredible to see how the number of attendees grew over the years @ghc #GHC17 pic.twitter.com/hmVrINdUen — Lulwah (@LulwahMA) October 3, 2017 This was my first time attendin g the conference and I was fortunate to receive an AnitaB.org travel scholarship to attend GHC. The scholarships cover registration, travel, hotel, and meal expenses. Only 657 were selected from almost