2012-06-12: JCDL 2012 Doctoral Consortium

The ODU WS-DL research group kicked off JCDL 2012 at The George Washington University by presenting the first two Doctoral Consortium papers on June 10th, 2012. The Doctoral Consortium is a workshop for PhD students that are in the early stages of defining their research. It is a venue for presenting a potential path through the PhD, as well as a way to receive feedback from peers and other researchers. Past WS-DL students have benefited from the workshop, including Joan Smith, Frank McCown, Martin Klein, Chuck Cartledge, and Ahmed Alsum. Hany SalahEldeen and I (Justin F. Brunelle) were honored and excited to be the next class of WS-DL students to participate.


The first session was the Data Preservation and Curation section, chaired by Maristella Agosti. I presented the first paper entitled "Filling in the Blanks: Capturing Dynamically Generated Content". My work will study capturing, sharing, and archiving Web 2.0 resources that traditional crawlers cannot archive. This will include studying the prevalence and characteristics of unarchivable resources, as well as the capture of client-side events and representations.



Hany presented the second paper, rounding out the one-two punch of Old Dominion University attendees. His paper entitled "User Intention Modeling in Temporal Navigation and Preservation of Shared Resources in Social Media" proposes work that will study how to ensure that resources shared over social media do not change between the time they are shared and the time they are viewed. This will produce a framework that will model user intention upon sharing resources.




Plato L. Smith II finished the first session with proposed research to define best practices, definitions, concepts, and terms within the digital preservation discipline. This work would provide methods of evaluating and measuring impact and risk of solutions, as well as improve relationships between stakeholders.

Session II, chaired by Kazunari Sugiyama, focused on Document Mining and Processing. James Creel began this session by presenting his work in metadata extraction and disambiguation for document labeling. His work utilizes feature extraction, Latent Semantic Analysis, disambiguation, and supervised learning of the system before depositing an item into a repository.

Jinsong Zhang was the second and final presenter. His work identifies "hot topics" in an academic author's field and points out the new and influential papers or publications in that area (ranked by an adapted PageRank algorithm). This work benefits student researchers by aiding their search for prior works.

Session III, immediately following a wonderful lunch, was chaired by Pertti Vakkari and focused on Information Search and Retrieval. Roberto Gonzalez-Ibanez presented his work on the effect of emotions in collaborative information retrieval tasks, and how different feedback influenced the efficiency of an information finding task.

Christopher G. Harris presented his work on applying crowdsourcing and serious games to information retrieval. His work begins with a framework for information retrieval tasks, and has identified and ranked potential stages at which gamification is most beneficial. Most importantly, he identifies aspects of the process that can benefit the most from human checking or input.

Michael Zarro finished Session III with his work on Health Information Search. This work will identify different health information seeking behaviors and help improve the search experience by improving the provided information. This work takes each aspect of the experience, such as the authoritative sources and user motivation and search ability, and improves the search results provided by the system.

Session IV: Information Interaction and Use was chaired by Sally Jo Cunningham. HyunSeung Koh began the session with her research on user interactions in active reading in ebooks. He work studies how users interact with a medium during active reading, and how the same behaviors can be translated into a "design of interactivity" for ebooks.

The last presenter of Session IV, and the last presenter of the day, was Clare Llewellyn. Her work analyzed online arguments and defines a structure of online argumentation for media such as article comments sections or Twitter discussions. This structure is used to identify threads within the argument in order to present only relevant information to the reader.

To round out the day, Luanne Freund chaired an Advisor Panel of Edie Rasmussen, George Buchanan, and Rick Furuta. During a day of presented research, feedback, and collaboration, the panel provided a way to summarize the events of the day and provide broad feedback to the students. This feedback was not only directed at the day's presentations, but also included advice on successfully completing a Ph.D. and where the degree can take individuals after school. Without a doubt, the feedback provided during this event will allow the participants to improve the direction of their academic careers.


Before completing this post, we must thank the Doctoral Consortium Co-Chairs Luanne Freund and Mounia Lalmas, as well as the numerous reviewers and professors that provided feedback during the workshop. Without all of this help, we wouldn't have been able to produce such quality work. Thank you!


--Justin F. Brunelle

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