Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

On July 20-22, I was at the NDIIPP Partners Meeting in Arlington VA, along with Martin Klein and Michele Weigle . The Library of Congress has not yet uploaded a public summary of the meeting, but there were a number of interesting additions to previous NDIIPP Partners Meetings (edit: the meeting slides are now available). First, there were keynotes from both the Librarian of Congress , James Billington , as well as the Archivist of the United States , David Ferriero . There was also a ceremony to commemorate the charter members (which includes ODU CS ) of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA). I don't think the NDSA has a canonical web site yet, so the iPRES 2009 paper by Anderson, Gallinger & Potter is probably the best available description (edit: LC has announced a NDSA web site ). There was a theme of exploring the questions about "why we should care about digital preservation". The Library of Congress debuted this video, now available on th

On July 12-13 2010 I was at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2010 in Redmond WA. The agenda was exciting and one of the few conferences that where I've had real difficulty in choosing which of the parallel session to attend. The first keynote was about Kinect for Xbox 360 . The demos were very impressive and I had no idea that motion capture was ready for the home market. Check out the trailer at the MS site . The next session I attended was about the "Bing Dialog Model". I must confess that I'm unconvinced on how different Bing is from Google. Here's a side-by-side comparison of each search engine on the query "Michael Nelson": They seem nearly identical to me: the tri-panel layout (controls on left, content in center, ads on right), the link layout/colors ( blue title , black summary, green URI), interspersed images, tabs at the top, etc. The extended summary Bing gives you when you mouse over a link region is nice, and some of th

I presented a poster at the 2010 13th Conference on Cloud Physics 13th Conference on Atmospheric Radiation in Portland Oregon, June 28 - July 2. This was my first atmospheric science meeting in the 2 years since taking off from NASA to attend full-time graduate studies at Old Dominion University . It was good to be back and catch up on old and new atmospheric sciences research being conducted by my colleages and others. This conference takes place every 4 years. There were approximately 300 hundred scientists from around the world in attendance of which 60-70 were from NASA Langley. This was one of our important conferences to showcase our latest cloud and radiation results and products. Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System ( CERES ) group were well represented. It seem like everyone at Langley who works on CERES were there. I saw many familiar faces and met several new CERES folks. My paper was entitled Alternative Method for Data Fusion of NASA CERES and A-TRAIN

As mentioned earlier I had two papers accepted at HT and JCDL. In June it was time to travel to the conferences and represent the Old Dominion University colors. HT 2010 took place in Toronto, Canada from June 13th-16th and was hosted by the University of Toronto . The acceptance rate of 37% was slightly higher than last year but the number of registered attendees seemed comparable. I was glad to be able to give the very first presentation since it secured the probably greatest audience of the entire conference. My slides are available through Slideshare. Is This a Good Title? View more presentations from Old Dominion University . The paper itself titled " Is This a Good Title " can be obtained through the ACM Digital Library and its content was covered in my earlier post . My personal highlight of the conference was the keynote by Andrew Dillon . He argued that research on Hypertext today is shaped too much by the Internet and its (inter-)linked natu

I attended the 2010 Foo Camp in Sebastopol CA, June 25-27. For those who are unfamiliar, Foo Camp is an invitation-only " unconference " -- which is basically a conference that consists entirely of birds-of-a-feather sessions as well as the impromptu hallway and dinner conversations that make conferences useful. There were approximately 250 people there and by my estimation they were mostly young (25-35) entrepreneurs (current and former). There were a smattering of others as well: artists, writers, professors, VCs, etc. The best way I can describe Foo Camp is a combination of Burning Man (culture of participation), SIGGRAPH (culture of demonstration), and a country club (culture of capitalism). Geeks aren't really known for being extroverted, but the format of Foo Camp pretty much requires meeting new people and interaction with people outside of your existing circle of colleagues. I was surprised at how approachable most people were. Formulating the sche