Showing posts with label Doctoral Consortium. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doctoral Consortium. Show all posts

Monday, October 24, 2016

2016-10-24: 20th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2016) Trip Report


"Dad, he is pushing random doorbell buttons", Dr. Herzog's daughter complained about her brother while we were walking back home late night after having dinner in the city center of Potsdam. Dr. Herzog smiled and replied, "it's rather a cool idea, let's all do it". Repeating the TPDL 2015 tradition, Dr. Michael Herzog's family was hosting me (Sawood Alam) at their place after the TPDL 2016 conference in Hannover. Leaving some cursing people behind (who were disturbed by false doorbells), he asked me, "how was your conference this year?"

Day 1



Between the two parallel sessions of the first day, I attended the Doctoral Consortium session as a participant. The chair Kjetil Nørvåg, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway, began the session with the formal introduction of the session structure and timeline. Out of the seven accepted Doctoral Consortium submissions, only five could make it to the workshop.
My talk was mainly praised for the good content organization, an easy to follow story for the problem description, tiered approach to solving problems, and inclusion of the work and publication plans. Konstantina's talk on political bias identification generated the maximum discussion during the QA session. I owe her references to A visual history of Donald Trump dominating the news cycle and Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half.


Each presenter was assigned a mentor for more in-depth feedback on their work and provide and outsider's perspective that would help define the scope of the thesis and recognize parts that might need more elaboration. After formal presentation session, presenters were spread apart for one-to-one session with their corresponding mentor. Nattiya Kanhabua, from Aalborg University, Denmark, was my mentor. She provided great feedback and some useful references that might be relevant to my research. We also talked about the possibilities of collaboration in future where our research interest intersects.


After the conclusion of the Doctoral Consortium Workshop we headed to Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) where Mila Runnwerth welcomed us to German National Library of Science and Technology. She gave us an insightful presentation followed by a guided tour to the library facilities.


Day 2


The main conference started on the second day with David Bainbridge's keynote presentation on "Mozart's Laptop: Implications for Creativity in Multimedia Digital Libraries and Beyond". He introduced a tool named Expeditee that gives a universal UI for text, image, and music interaction. The talk was full of interesting references and demonstrations such a querying music by humming. Following the keynote, I attended the Digital Humanities track while missing the other two parallel tracks.
Then I moved to another track for Search and User Aspects sessions.
Following the regular presentation tracks the Posters and Demos session was scheduled. It came to me as a surprise that all the Doctoral Consortium submissions were automatically included in the Posters session (apart from the regular poster and demo submissions) and assigned reserved places in the hall for posters, which means I had to do something for the traditional Minute Madness event that I was not prepared for. So I ended up reusing #IAmNotAGator gag that I prepared for JCDL 2016 Minute Madness and utilized the poster time to advertise MemGator and Memento.


Day 3


On the second day of the conference I had two papers to present. So, I decided to wear business formal attire. As a consequence, the conference photographer stopped me at the building entrance and asked me to pose for him near the information desk. The lady on the information desk tried to explain me routes to various places of the city, but the modeling session extended so long that it became awkward and we both started smiling.

The day began with Jan Rybicki's keynote talk on "Pretty Things Done with (Electronic) Texts: Why We Need Full-Text Access". For the first time I came to know about the term Stylometry. His slides were full of beautiful visualizations. The tool used to generate the data for the visualizations is published as an R package called stylo. After the keynote, I attended the Web Archives session.


After the lunch break I moved to the Short Papers track where I had my second presentation of the day.


After the coffee break I attended the Multimedia and Time Aspects track while missing the panel session on Digital Humanities and eInfrastructures.
In the evening we headed to the XII Apostel Hannover for the conference dinner. The food was good. During the dinner they announced Giannis Tsakonas and Joffrey Decourselle as the best paper and the best poster winners respectively.


Day 4


On the last day of the main conference I decided to skip the panel and tutorial tracks in the favor of the Digital Library Evaluation research track.
After a brief coffee break everyone gathered for the closing keynote presentation by Tony Veale on "Metaphors All the Way Down: The many practical uses of figurative language understanding". The talk was very informative, interesting, and full of hilarious examples. He mentioned the Library of Babel which reminded me of a digital implementation of it and a video talking about it. Slides looked more like a comic strip which was very much in line with the theme of the talk which ended up talking about various Twitter bots such as MetaphorIsMyBusiness and MetaphorMirror.

Following the closing keynote the main conference was concluded with some announcements. Next year TPDL 2017 will be hosted in Thessaloniki, Greece, during September 17-21, 2017. TPDL is willing to expand the scope and encouraging young researchers to come forward with session ideas, chair events, and take the lead. People who are active on social media and scientific communities are encouraged to spread the word out to bring more awareness and participation. This year's Twitter hashtag was #TPDL2016 where all the relevant Tweets can be found.


The rest of the afternoon I spent in the Alexandria Workshop.

Day 5


It was my last day in Hannover. I checked out from the conference hotel, Congress Hotel am Stadtpark Hannover. The hotel was located next to the conference venue and the views from the hotel were good. However, the experience at the hotel was not very good. It was located far away from the city center and there were no restaurants nearby. Despite complaints I have found an insect jumping on my laptop and bed on fifteenth floor, late night, for two consecutive nights. The basic Wi-Fi was useless and unreliable. In my opinion, nowadays, high-speed Wi-Fi in hotels should not be counted in luxury amenities, especially for business visitors. The hotel was not cheap either. These factors should be considered when choosing a conference venue and hotel by organizers.

I realized I still have some time to spare before I begin my journey. So, I decided to go to the conference venue where the Alexandria Workshop was ongoing. I was able to catch the keynote by Jane Winters in which she talked about many Web archiving related familiar projects. Then I headed to the Hannover city center to catch the train to Stendal.

"I know the rest of the story, since I received you in Stendal", Dr. Herzog interrupted me. We have reached home and it was already very late, hence, we called it a night and went to our beds.

Post-conference Days


After the conference, I spent a couple of days with Dr. Herzog's family on my way back. We visited Stendal University of Applied Sciences, met some interesting people for lunch at Schlosshotel Tangermünde, explored Potsdam by walking and biking, did some souvenir shopping and kitchen experiments, visited Dr. Herzog's daughter's school and the Freie Universität Berlin campus along with many other historical places on our way, and had dinner in Berlin where I finally revealed the secret of the disappearing earphone magic trick to Mrs. Herzog. On Sunday morning Dr. Herzog dropped me to the Berlin airport.


Dr. Herzog is a great host and tour guide. He has a beautiful, lovely, and welcoming family. Visiting his family is a single sufficient reason for me to visit Germany anytime.

--
Sawood Alam

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Thursday, June 30, 2016

2016-06-30: JCDL 2016 Doctoral Consortium Trip Report



Traditionally, Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) has hosted a workshop session called Doctoral Consortium (DC) specific to PhD students of digital library research field and this year (JCDL 2016) was no exception. The workshop was intended for students that are in the early stages of their dissertation work. Several WS-DL group members attended and reported past DC workshops and this time it was my turn.

This year's doctoral consortium (June 19, 2016) was chaired by George Buchanan, J. Stephen Downie, and Uma Murthy. Committee members included Sally Jo Cunningham, Michael Nelson, Martin Klein, and Edie Rasmussen. A total of six PhD students participated in the workshop and presented their work. The doctoral consortium session is generally not open for public participation, however, Michele C. Weigle (JCDL 2016 program chair), Mat Kelly (last year's DC participant), and Alexandar Nwala (potential future participant) also attended the session. Each presenter was given about 20 minutes for talk and 10 minutes for questions and comments.

I, Sawood Alam form Old Dominion University was the first presenter of the session with my research topic, "Web Archive Profiling for Efficient Memento Aggregation". I elaborated on the problem space of my research work by giving an example of collection building, indexing, updating indexes, and profiling or summarization of the collection for better collection understanding and efficient lookup routing. With the help of real life examples and events, I established the importance of small web archives and the need of efficient means of their aggregation. I further explained the methodology and various approaches of web archive profiling depending on available resources and desired detail. I briefly described the evaluation plan and preliminary results published/accepted in TPDL15, IJDL16, and TPDL16. Finally, I presented my tentative timeline of work and publication plans. My work is supported in part by the IIPC.


Adeleke Olateju Abayomi from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa presented her work entitled, "An Investigation of the Extent of Automation of Public Libraries in South-West Nigeria". It was a survey based research for which she conducted interviews and questionnaires with randomly selected librarians for the study. Attendees of the workshop asked questions about the scope of the automation she was studying, was it limited to the background library management process or the public facing services as well and whether the library patrons were also interviewed? Committee members suggested her to also include case studies from near by countries that have invested in library automation to strengthen her arguments.


Bakare Oluwabunmi Dorcas from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa presented her research work on "The Usage of Social Media Technologies among Academic Librarians in South Western Nigeria". She used a survey based research approach by conducting interviews and questionnaires with academic librarians of six universities. She mentioned how librarians are using social media such as Facebook groups for provision of library and information service delivery to library clienteles. The outcome from the study is expected to improve practice, inform policy and extend theory in the field of Social Media Technologies (SMT) use in academic libraries based on a developing country context. She was suggested to examine whether the material posted on social media is periodically archived elsewhere.


Prashant Chandrasekar from Virginia Tech presented his work on "A DL System to Facilitate Behavioral Studies of Social Networks". He is working on designing a framework that would enable researchers to conduct hypothesis testing on information related to the study of human behavior in a clinical trial that involves social networks. The system is being built with the immediate aim to serve the needs of a teams of researchers that are part of the Social Interactome project. However, the design of the framework and the scenarios of use will be generalized to all psychologists/sociologists.


Lei Li from the University of Pittsburgh and China Scholarship Council presented "A Judgement Model for Academic Content Quality on Social Media". Initially, there was some lack of clarity on what she meant by "academic content" on social media, which she clarified that her study is around ResearchGate posts and comments. The general comment from the committee on her quality assessment approach can be summarized as "it would be great to establish something of this sort, but she should limit the scope for her PhD work." Edie Rasmussen nicely put the challenge of creating a data set for quality measure as, "Life's too short to generate your own data set." which was in line with Yasmin AlNoamany saying, "I will never do it again!" while describing a manually labeled data set during her recent PhD defense. Dr. Michael Nelson suggested Lei Li to pick a good example and walk through it to elaborate on the process.


The final presentation of the day was from Jessica Ogden from the University of Southampton. Jessica presented her ongoing PhD research entitled "Interrogating the Politics and Performativity of Web Archives" which is centered on web archival practice, specifically looking at selection and collection practices across different web archiving communities in the field. Jessica prefaced the presentation with some information regarding her academic background to provide context for how the interdisciplinary project is being approached. Some philosophical questions were raised regarding the nature of web archives (and assumptions about the Web itself), as well as importance placed on the documenting the assumptions made during selection and collection of web archives (which are often left undocumented). For more details on Jessica’s research and the presentation at JCDL 2016 DC see her blog post.


Once all six participants presented their work, committee members highlighted some general comments such as every presenter did a good job of wrapping their talk in the allotted time and leaving enough time for questions and comments. They also noted that slides should not have too many words in them so that the presenter ends up reading them verbatim, on the other hand they should not be on the other extreme either where every slide has nothing but pictures. After these comments, the session was open for everyone to provide any feedback or ask general questions from presenters or the committee members. I noted that this year's doctoral consortium was dominated by "social media" based study.

On our way back to the hotel Alexander said, "the committee members had such a deep understanding of the subject and provided very useful comments." Mat and I replied, "yes they did indeed." It is strongly recommended that if possible, every PhD candidate should participate in a Doctoral Consortium workshop of the respective field at least once to gain some insights and perspective from the people outside their thesis committee members.

You may also like to read the main JCDL 2016 conference coverage by Alexander and the WADL 2016 workshop coverage by Mat.

Update (July 2, 2016): Added Bakare's slides and updated the description of her talk.

--
Sawood Alam

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Friday, June 26, 2015

2015-06-26: JCDL 2015 Doctoral Consortium

Mat Kelly attended and presented at the JCDL 2015 Doctoral Consortium. This is his report.                           

Evaluating progress between milestones in a PhD program is difficult due to the inherent open-endedness of research. A means of evaluating whether a student's topic is sound and has merit while still early on in his career is to attend a doctoral consortium. Such an event, as the one held at the annual Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), has previously provided a platform for WS-DL students (see 2014, 2013, 2012, and others) to network with faculty and researchers from other institutions as well as observe the approach that other PhD students at the same point in their career use to explain their respective topics.

As the wheels have turned, I have showed enough progress in my research for it to be suitable for preliminary presentation at the 2015 JCDL Doctoral Consortium -- so did so this past Sunday in Knoxville, Tennessee. Along with seven other graduate students from various other universities throughout the world, I gave a twenty minute presentation with ten to twenty minutes of feedback from the audience of both other presenting graduate students, faculty, and researchers.

Kazunari Sugiyama of National University of Singapore (where Hany SalahEldeen recently spent a semester as a research intern) welcomed everyone and briefly described the format of the consortium before getting underway. Each student was to have twenty minutes to present with ten to twenty minutes for feedback from the doctors and the other PhD students present.

The Presentations

The presentations were broken up into four topical categories. In the first section, "User's Relevance in Search", Sally Jo Cunningham introduced the two upcoming speakers. Sampath Jayarathna (@OpenMaze) of Texas A&M University was the first presenter of the day with his topic, "Unifying Implicit and Explicit Feedback for Multi-Application User Interest Modeling". In his research, he asked users to type short queries, which he used to investigate methods for search optimization. He asked, "Can we combine implicit and semi-explicit feedback to create a unified user interest model based on multiple every day applications?". Using a browser-based annotation tool, users in his study were able to provide relevance feedback of the search results via explicit and implicit feedback. One of his hypotheses is that if he has a user model, he should be able to compare the model against explicit feedback that the user provides for providing better relevance of results.


After Sampath, Kathy Brennan (@knbrennan) of University of North Carolina presented her topic, "User Relevance Assessment of Personal Finance Information: What is the Role of Cognitive Abilities?". In her presentation she alluded to the similarities of buying a washer and dryer to obtaining a mortgage in respect to being an indicator for a person's cognitive abilities. "Even for really intelligent people, understanding prime and subprime rates can be a challenge.", she said. One study she described analyzed rounding behavior with stock prices being an example of the observed critical details by an individual. Through testing 69 different abilities psychometrically through users analyzing documents for relevance, she found that someone with lower cognitive abilities will have a lower threshold for relevance and thus attribute more documents as relevant than those with higher cognitive abilities. "However", she said, "those with a higher cognitive ability were doing a lot more in the same amount of time as those with lower cognitive abilities."

After a short coffee break, Richard Furuta of Texas A&M; University introduced the two speakers of the second session titled, "Analysis and Construction of Archive". Yingying Yu of Dalian Maritime University presented first in this session with "Simulate the Evolution of Scientific Publication Repository via Agent-based Modeling". In her research, she is seeking to find candidate co-authors for academic publications based on a model that includes venue, popularity and author importance as a partial set of parameters to generate a model. "Sometimes scholars only focus on homogenous network", she said.


Mat Kelly (@machawk1, your author) presented second in the session with "A Framework for Aggregating Private and Public Web Archives". In my work, I described the issues of integrate private and public web archives in respect to access restrictions, privacy issues, and other concerns that would arise were the archives' results to be aggregated.


The conference then broke for boxed lunch and informal discussions amongst the attendees.


After resuming sessions after the lunch break, George Buchanan (@GeorgeRBuchanan) of City University of London welcomed everybody and introduced the two speakers of the third session of the day, "User Generated Contents for Better Service".


Faith Okite-Amughoro (@okitefay) of University of KwaZulu-Natal presented her topic, "The Effectiveness of Web 2.0 in Marketing Academic Library Services in Nigerian Universities: a Case Study of Selected Universities in South-South Nigeria". Faith's research noted that there has not been any assessment on how the libraries in her region of study have used Web 2.0 to market their services. "The real challenge is not how to manage their collection, staff and technology", she said, "but to turn these resources into services". She found that the most used Web 2.0 tools were social networking, video sharing, blogs, and generally places where the user could add themselves.


Following Faith, Ziad Matni (@ziadmatni) of Rutgers University presented his topic, "Using Social Media Data to Measure and Influence Community Well-Being". Ziad asked, "How can we gauge how well people are doing in their local communities though the data that they generate on social media?" He is currently looking for useful measure of components of community well-being and their relationships with collective feelings of stress and tranquility (as he defined in his work). He is hoping to focus on one or two social indicators and to understand the influence factors that correlate the sentiment expressed on social media and a geographical community's well-being.


After Ziad's presentation, the group took a coffee break then started the last presentation session of the day, "Mining Valuable Contents". Kazunari Sugiyama (who welcomed the group at the beginning of the day) introduced the two speakers of the session.


The first presentation in this session was from Kahyun Choi of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign presented her work, "From Lyrics to Their Interpretations: Automated Reading between the Lines". In her work, she is looking to try to find the source of subject information from songs with the assumption that machines might have difficult analyzing songs' lyrics. She has three general research questions, the first relating lyrics and their interpretations, the second whether topic modeling can discover the subject of the interpretations, and the third in reliably obtaining the interpretations from the lyrics. She is training and testing a subject classifier where she collected lyrics and their interpretations from SongMeanings.com. From this she obtained eight subject categories: religion, sex, drugs, parents, war, places, ex-lover, and death. With 100 songs in each category, she assigned each song to have only one subject. She then obtained the top ten interpretations per song to prevent the results from being skewed by songs with a large number of interpretations.


The final group presentation of the day was to come from Mumini Olatunji Omisore of Federal University of Technology with "A Classification Model for Mining Research Publications from Crowdsourced Data". Because of visa issues, he was unable to attend but planned on presenting via Skype or Google Hangouts. After changing wireless configurations, services, and many other attempts, the bandwidth at the conference venue proved insufficient and he was unable to present. A contingency was setup between him and the doctoral consortium organizers to review his slides.


Two-on-Two

Following the attempts to allow Mumini to present remotely, the consortium broke up into group of four (two students and two doctors) for private consultations. The doctors in my group (Drs. Edie Rasmussen and Michael Nelson) provided extremely helpful feedback in both my presentation and research objectives. Particularly valuable was their helpful discussions for how I could go about improving the evaluation of my proposed research.

Overall, the JCDL Doctoral Consortium was a very valuable experience. By viewing how other PhD students were approaching their research and obtaining critical feedback on mine, I believe the experience to be priceless for improving the quality of one's PhD research.

— Mat (@machawk1)

Edit: Subsequent to this post, Lulwah reported on the main portion of the JCDL 2015 conference and Sawood reported on the WADL workshop at JCDL 2015.

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Tuesday, September 9, 2014

2014-09-09: DL2014 Doctoral Consortium


After exploring London on Sunday, I attended the first DL2014 session: the Doctoral Consortium. Held in the College Building at the City University London, the Doctoral Consortium offered early-career Ph.D. students the opportunity to present their research and academic plans and receive feedback from digital libraries professors and researchers.

Edie Rasmussen chaired the Doctoral Consortium. I was a presenter at the Doctoral Consortium in 2012 with Hany SalahEldeen, but I attended this year as a Ph.D. student observer.

Session I: User Interaction was chaired by José Borbinha. Hugo Huurdeman was first to present his work entitled "Adaptive Search Systems for Web archive research". His work focuses on information retrieval and discovery in the archives. He explained the challenge with searching not only across documents but also across time.

Georgina Hibberd presented her work entitled "Metaphors for discovery: how interfaces shape our relationship with library collections." Georgina is working on digitally modeling the physical inputs library users receive when interacting with books and physical library media to allow the same information to be available when interacting with digital representations of the collection. For example, how can we incorporate physical proximity and accidental discovery in the digital systems, or how can we demonstrate frequency of use that would previously be shown in the condition of a book's spine?

Yan Ru Guo presented her work entitled "Designing and Evaluating an Affective Information Literacy Game" in which she proposes serious games to help tertiary students in an effort to help their ability to perform searches and information discovery in digital environments.

After a break to re-caffeinate, Session II: Working with Digital Collections began. Dion Goh chaired the session. Vincent Barrallon presented his work entitled "Collaborative Construction of Updatable Digital Critical Editions: A Generic Approach." This work aims to establish an updatable data structure to represent the collaborative flow of annotation, especially with respect to editorial efforts. He proposes using bidirectional graphs, triple graphs, or annotated graphs as representatives, and proposes methods of identifying graph similarity.

Hui Li finished the session with her presentation entitled "Social Network Extraction and Exploration of Historic Correspondences" in which she is working to use Named Entity Extraction to create a social network from digitized historical documents. Her effort utilizes topic modeling and event extraction to construct the network.

Due to a scheduling audible, lunch and Session III: Social Factors overlapped slightly. Ray Larson chaired this session, and Mat Kelly was able to attend after landing in LHR and navigating to our hotel. Maliheh Farrokhnia presented her work entitled "A request-based framework for FRBRoo graphical representation: With emphasis on heterogeneous cultural information needs." Her work takes user interests (through adaptive selection of target information) to present relational graphs of digital library content.

Abdulmumin Isah presented his work entitled "The Adoption and Usage of Digital Library Resources by Academic Staff in Nigerian Universities: A Case Study of University of Ilorin." His work highlights a developing country's use of digital resources in academia and cites factors influencing the success of digital libraries.

João Aguir Castro presented his work entitled "Multi-domain Research Data Description -- Fostering the participation of researchers in an ontology based data management environment." His work with Dendro uses metadata and ontologies to aid in long-term preservation of research data.

The last hour of the consortium was dedicated to an open mic session chaired by Cathy Marshall with the goal of having the student observers present their current work. I presented first and explained my work that aims to mitigate the impact of JavaScript on archived web pages. Mat went next and discussed his work about integrating public and private web archives with tools like WAIL and WARCreate.

Alexander Ororbia presented his work on using artificial intelligence and deep learning for error correcting crowd sourced data from scholarly texts. Md Arafat Sultan discussed his work on using natural language processing to detect similarity in text to identify text segments that adhered to set standards (e.g. educational standards). Kahyun Choi discussed her work on perceived mood in eastern music from the point of view of western listeners. Finally, Fawaz Alarfaj discussed his work using entity extraction, information retrieval, and natural language processing to identify experts within a specified field.

As usual, the Doctoral Consortium was full of interesting ideas, valuable recommendations, and highly motivated Ph.D. students. Tomorrow marks the official beginning of DL2014.


--Justin F. Brunelle
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Tuesday, June 12, 2012

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.
Filling in the Blanks: Capturing Dynamically Generated Content

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.

Hany's JCDL Doctoral Consortium
View more presentations from heinestien


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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Wednesday, January 13, 2010

2010-01-13: JCDL 2009 Doctoral Consortium Abstracts Published

The Winter 2009 Bulletin of the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries (TCDL) has the extended abstracts from the Doctoral Consortium of the 2009 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2009). Thanks to Lisa Spiro for such a great job putting together the latest IEEE TCDL Bulletin.

Megan Winget (UT Austin) and I organized the doctoral consortium this year. We were fortunate enough to have 24 submissions this year -- a record number -- of which we selected 14 for presentation. Those 14 students had their extended abstracts reviewed by a 10 person committee prior to the consortium and then they presented their research to the committee. More information about the participants and processes is available in our opening editorial and the JCDL 2009 Doctoral Consortium page.

Neither Megan nor I will be involved in the 2010 JCDL Doctoral Consortium, to be held in Gold Coast, Australia. Those wishing to participate should check the JCDL 2010 web site for details.

-- Michael
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