Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

I am Kritika Garg, a first-year Ph.D. student at Old Dominion University. My research interests are in the fields of web archiving, social media, and natural language processing. I joined the Old Dominion University in the fall of 2019 under the supervision of Dr. Michael L. Nelson and Dr. Michele C. Weigle . I work with Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group (WS-DL) where our focus is in the fields of web archiving, digital preservation, social media, and human-computer interaction. My current research work is in the field of web archiving, including analyzing access patterns of robots and humans in web archives and studying whether the patterns prevalent with the Internet Archive are present across different web archives. I completed my undergrad from  Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University  in June 2019. During my undergrad, I started attending various tech events by tech-groups such as  Google Developer Group ,  PyDelhi ,  Women Techmakers,   Women Who Code ,

"Is the pipeline literally running from your laptop?" "Don't be silly, my laptop disconnects far too often to host a service we rely on. It's running on my phone." Four WS-DL classes are being offered for Spring 2020: CS 395 Research Methods in Data and Web Science is taught by Dr. Michael L. Nelson , Wednesdays 4:20pm - 7pm.  This class will introduce undergraduates to writing proposals, reading & writing papers, giving presentations, Python, Web APIs, reproducibility, LaTeX, and GitHub. CS 432/532 Web Science is taught by by Dr. Michele C. Weigle , Tues/Thurs, 11am-12:15pm.  This class explores web phenomena with a variety of data science tools such as Python, R, D3, ML, and IR.   CS 480/580 Intro to Artificial Intelligence is taught by Dr. Vikas Ashok , Tues/Thur, 3-4:15pm.  The class will cover fundamental concepts, principles, and techniques in Artificial Intelligence. Topics include problem representation, problem-solving methods, searc

Fig. 1 (Click on image to expand) 365 dots in 2019 - News stories for 365 days in 2019. 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 represents the average degree of the GCC. In March 2019 I published " 365 dots in 2018 " where I presented the top stories for each day in 2018 according to StoryGraph . Now that 2019 is over, it is natural to ask  what were the top news stories of 2019? News organizations will often publish "the year's top stories" or "year in review" (e.g., CNN , CBS , FoxNews ), but the selection criteria is not always made explicit. The closest to a selection criteria I have seen from news organizations is the presentation of their  top most viewed (or most popular) news stories. But this criteria is not accessible to ordinary users who cannot access the private traffic statisti

My name is Himarsha Jayanetti. I am an international student from Sri Lanka. I joined Old Dominion University as a Master’s student in Fall 2019 under the supervision of Dr. Michele Weigle . My current research project involves observing access patterns of robots vs. humans in Internet Archive and studying whether the patterns prevalent in the Internet Archive are present across other web archives. M y collaborator, Kritika Garg, and I are working on this project by  extending  prior research   by  WS-DL  alumna  Dr. Yasmin AlNoamany .  My intrinsic strength has always been my quantitative and analytical potential, embedded with a special passion for mathematics from my early schooling days. This in turn made me choose mathematics, physics, and chemistry at my high school. An exceptional result in the advanced level examinations in Sri Lanka helped me get the Nehru Memorial Scholarship offered by the  Ministry of External Affairs of India .  Under this scholarship, I started my

My name is  Muntabir Hasan Choudhury . I am an international student from Bangladesh. I joined the  WS-DL  ( Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group ) at Old Dominion University as a PhD student in the Fall of 2019 under the direct supervision of  Dr. Jian Wu . My current research involves text mining on non-born digital Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), in collaboration with Dr. Fox and Bill Ingram at Virginia Tech Computer Science .  My research interests include, but are not limited to, Big Data, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning. I was always an enthusiast about science, technology, and innovation. Because of curiosity regarding computing, computer architecture, robotics, and artificial intelligence, I decided to study Computer Engineering at college. In May 2018, I received my Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Elizabethtown College, PA . While studying at Elizabethtown College , I was energized by the study of Big Data

Source: Techworm GitHub is used by more than 40 million developers and currently hosts more than 100 million repositories. In early November 2019, GitHub shared plans to open the Arctic Code Vault, an effort to store and preserve open source software like Flutter and TensorFlow . With this endeavor, code for all open source projects will be stored on specialized ultra-durable 3,500-foot film with frames that include 8.8 million pixels each, designed to last 1,000 years. The data can be read by a computer or a human with a magnifying glass in case of a global power outage. "Our primary mission is to preserve open source software for future generations. We also intend the GitHub Archive Program to serve as a testament to the importance of the open source community. It’s our hope that it will, both now and in the future, further publicize the worldwide open source movement; contribute to greater adoption of open source and open data policies worldwide; and encourage long-ter

My name is  Bhanuka Mahanama, I joined Old Dominion University as a Ph.D. student in fall 2019 under the supervision of Dr. Sampath Jayarathna . I'm currently researching audio, visual, and eye-tracking integration in classroom environments. My research interests include multi-sensory environments, information retrieval, and machine learning. University of Moratuwa I received my bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Moratuwa , Sri Lanka in 2018. I followed the ICE (Integrated Computer Engineering) stream with courses in embedded and industrial computer engineering systems. I also have an advanced diploma in management accounting from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA)  in the UK. I was a visiting instructor for computer networks at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. These lab sessions ranged from setting up a basic network with routers to configuring multi-area OSPF environments using CISCO route

Between November 18 and 20, I attended the 2019 International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2019) . K-CAP is an ACM sponsored conference, rated as “A” in the   ERA conference rating system . It happens once every two years. Its counterpart in Europe is EKAW (unfortunately, EKAW is rated as B), which also happens every two years. I had papers accepted by K-CAP 2015 and 2017. This year, I co-authored a short paper titled “ Searching for Evidence of Scientific News in Scholarly Big Data ” ( poster link ). The first author is my co-advised student Reshad Hoque at ODU . I also co-authored and presented a long paper titled “Automatic Slide Generation for Scientific Papers” in the 3rdInternational Workshop on Capturing Scientific Knowledge (SciKnow 2019) . The first author is my co-advised student Athar Sefid at Penn State.   Due to my tight schedule, I had to return right after the keynote by Peter Clark on the first day, so this trip report summarizes