Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

. @WebSciDL reunion at #jcdl2015 - 4 phd alumni, 3 phd students, 2 profs! pic.twitter.com/kA8CUYtZCW — Michael L. Nelson (@phonedude_mln) June 23, 2015 The Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group had a terrific 2015, marked by four new student members, one Ph.D. defense, and two large research grants.  In many ways it was even better than 2014 and 2013 . We had fewer students graduate or advance their status this year, but last year was unusually productive.  We did add four new students, as well as graduate a PhD student, an MS student, and had two other students advance their status: Hany SalahEldeen defended his Ph.D. on May 5, 2015 and then took a cross country motorcycle trip on his way to join Microsoft in Redmond, Washington.   Shawn Jones defended his M.S. thesis on March 23, 2015 and then joined LANL as a Graduate Research Assistant in the fall of 2015.  Shawn will continue his PhD work while @ LANL, working with Herbe...

The Old Market Square in Poznan On September 15 2015, Sawood Alam and I ( Yasmin AlNoamany ) attended the 2015 Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) Conference in Poznan, Poland. This year, WS-DL had four accepted papers in TPDL for three students ( Mohamed Aturban (who could not attend the conference because of visa issues), Sawood Alam, and Yasmin AlNoamany). Sawood and I arrived in Poznan on Monday, Sept. 14. Although we were tired from travel, we could not resist walking to the the best area in Poznan, the old market square . It was fascinating to see those beautiful colorful houses at night with the reflection of the water on them after it rained with the beautiful European music by many artists who were playing in the street. The next morning we headed to the conference, which was held in Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center . The organization of the conference was amazing and the general conference co-chairs, Marcin Werla and Cezary Mazurek , wer...

Two weeks ago (on Aug 3, 2015), I was glad to be invited to visit Internet Archive in San Francisco in order to share our latest work with a set of the Web Archiving pioneers from around the world. The attendees were Jefferson Bailey  and Vinay Goel  from IA, Nicholas Taylor  and Ahmed AlSum from Stanford, and Wolfgang Nejdl , Ivana Marenzi  and Helge Holzmann from L3S . First, we took a quick introduction to each others mentioning the purpose and the nature of our work to IA. Then, Nejdl introduced the Alexandria project , and demoed the ArchiveWeb project, which aims to develop tools and techniques to explore and analyze Web archives in a meaningful way. In the project, they develop tools that will allow users to visualize and collaboratively interact with Archive-it collections by adding new resources in the form of tags and comments. Furthermore, it contains a collaborative search and sharing platform. I presented the off-topic detection work with ...

Large, Dynamic and Ubiquitous –The Era of the Digital Library JCDL 2015 ( #JCDL2015 ) took place at the University of Tennessee Conference Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. The conference was four days long; June 21-25, 2015. This year three students from our WS-DL CS group at ODU  had their papers accepted as well as one poster (see trip reports for 2014, 2013 , 2012 , 2011 ). Dr. Weigle ( @weiglemc ), Dr. Nelson ( @phonedude_mln ), Sawood Alam ( @ibnesayeed ), Mat Kelly ( @machawk1 ) and I ( @LulwahMA ) went to the conference. We drove from Norfolk, VA. Four of our previous members of our group, Martin Klein (UCLA, CA) ( @mart1nkle1n ), Joan Smith (Linear B Systems, inc., VA) ( @joansm1th ), Ahmed Alsum (Stanford University, CA) ( @aalsum ) and Hany SalahEldeen (Microsoft, Seattle)( @hanysalaheldeen ), also met us there. The trip was around 8 hours. We enjoyed the mountain views and the beautiful farms. We also caught parts of a storm on our way, but it only lasted for ...