Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Fig. 1: News stories for 365 days in 2018. Each dot represents the average degree of the Giant Connected Component (GCC) with the largest average degree across all the 144 story graphs for a given day. The x-axis represents time, the y-axis represent the average degree of the selected GCC. Click to expand image. There was no shortage of big news headlines in 2018. Amidst this abundance, a natural question is what were the top news stories of 2018? There are multiple lists from different news organizations that present candidate top stories in 2018 such as  CNN's most popular stories and videos of 2018 , and  The year in review: Top news stories of 2018 month by month  from CBS. Even though such lists from respectable news organizations pass the "seems right test," they mostly present the top news stories without presenting an explanation for their process. In other words, they often do not state why some story made the list and why another did not make the list. We

I know this is a large topic and I may not have enough evidence to convince everyone, but based on my reviewing experiences on journal articles and conference proceedings, I strongly feel that computer and information science and engineering (CISE) papers need to put more text on describing and analyzing the data.  This argument partially comes from my background in astronomy and astrophysics. Astronomers and astrophysicists usually spend a huge chunk of text in their papers talking about data they adopt, including but not limited to where the data are collected, why they do not use another dataset, how the raw data are pre-processed, and carefully justify why they rule out outliers. They also do analysis on the data and report statistical properties, trend, or bias to ensure that they are using legitimate points in their plots. In contrast, for many papers I read and reviewed, even in top conferences, CISE people do not often do such work. They usually assume the datasets were

Update on 2019/03/27 at 18:29 GMT: The ArchiveTeam needs users to run Warrior instances to capture as much of Google+ as possible. If you have the resources, please pitch in. Details are on the ArchiveTeam Google+ project page . In 2017 I reviewed many storytelling, curation, and social media tools to determine which might be a suitable replacement for Storify , should the need arise. Google+ was one of the tools under consideration. It did not make the list of top three, but it did produce quality surrogates . On January 31, 2019, Sean Keane of CNET published an article indicating that the consumer version of Google+ will shut down on April 2, 2019. I knew that the social media service was being shut down in August, but I was surprised to see the new date. Google's blog mentions that they changed the deadline on December 10, 2018, for security reasons. David Rosenthal's recent blog post cites Google+ as yet another example of Google moving up a service decommissio

The  33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence , the 31st  Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, and the  9th Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence were held  at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, Honolulu, Hawaii. I have one paper accepted by IAAI 2019 on Cleaning Noisy and Heterogeneous Metadata for Record Linking across Scholarly Big Datasets, coauthored with Athar Sefid (my student at PSU), Jing Zhao (my mentee at PSU), Lu Liu (a graduate student who published a Nature Letter),  Cornelia Caragea (my collaborator at UIC),  Prasenjit Mitra , and  C. Lee Giles .  This year, AAAI receives the greatest number of submissions -- 7095 which doubles the submission in 2018. There are 18191 reviews collected and over 95% papers have 3 reviews. There are 1147 papers accepted, which takes 16.2% of all submissions. This is the lowest acceptance rate in history. There are in total 122 technical sessions, 460 oral presentations (15 min talk) and